Conceptual artist Claire Fontaine has long challenged the structures of power that shape language, art, and society. Her new exhibition Show Less, now on view at Mimosa House during Frieze London, confronts visibility, censorship, patriarchy, and the quiet violence embedded in modern life. Through neon, sculpture, and text, Fontaine examines what it means to show—and to withhold—under oppressive systems. We caught up with Claire Fontaine to discuss Show Less, the dialogue between art and news, and how language itself can become a battleground.
Your exhibition Show Less at Mimosa House coincides with Frieze London. How does timing the show alongside such a major cultural moment shape its reception?
Frieze like many art fairs has a rich program of talks and satellite events, it’s not only an appointment for art collectors but for art lovers at large. It’s an ideal moment to touch a large audience.
The installation Newsfloor (The Guardian) transforms the gallery into a space where art floats over daily headlines. What do you want viewers to feel in that collision between art and media?
The collision between the newspapers on the floor and the rest of the exhibition is always unexpected because the position of the headlines in relation to the artworks is casual and yet often surprisingly meaningful. The news these days are full of war and hope for the negotiations that could end the genocide in Palestine allowing for the return of the Israeli hostages. It’s extremely interesting to build a dialogue between these facts and the artworks in Show Less, because it’s an exhibition largely built around the tension between injustice and forgiveness, freedom and violence, patriarchy and love.
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The exhibition title Show Less plays with ideas of visibility, censorship, and even the policing of women’s bodies. How do you see these ideas resonating with our current cultural climate?
We are living in a present defined by war and oppression. Wars are a ritualized way of expressing conflicts between men. Women, children and those who aren’t willing or able to fight are hostage of this madness. We have war as a ritualized way of expressing hatred but no ritualized way of expressing love with the same power and force as bombs inflict destruction and death. We should imagine strategies of mass reparation, therapy, feminist teaching, a real way of rethinking what living together means for men, women, people of different nationalities and age. Patriarchy has created a lot of ignorance about these subject matters and we need to catch up urgently.
Your practice often appropriates and reconfigures iconic artworks. What does “vandalism as strategy” allow you to say about cultural fragility and political crisis?
Vandalism is evoked here as a way of creating visibility for the invisible abuse. Artworks are more cared for than people in times like ours. Bringing destruction in sanctuaries of conservation of valuable artworks is scandalous and brutally punished by the police these days. We are trying to spark a reflection on why our tolerance for injustice is so high and why don’t we feel as outraged by the terrible things that activists are trying to remind us.
The Brickbats combine bricks with scanned and altered book covers, suggesting both weaponry and lost knowledge. What drew you to this form, and what does it reveal about access to theory today?
The brickbats in this particular exhibition are tackling the lack of words, the silence, the censorship about the genocide in Palestine. In particular Flowers of Palestine evokes the ecocide that these two years of bombing, murdering and poisoning has inflicted to every living being on that soil. War has an ecological impact, an emotional price, with trauma some cells die in our brain, with hunger people get mentally and physically ill, the challenges that come with mutilations and operations performed without disinfectant and anaesthetics are unthinkable, life is fragile and it should never be abused but cared for and protected so that it can bloom.
Your new neon Fatherfucker reclaims a familiar insult and redirects it toward patriarchy. How do you see language itself as a site of gendered violence?
Language has always been a context of election for our work, it’s the first commons that we experience in life (we learn to speak by participating to a language that pre-existed to us and will survive us, that has been donated to us for free). The more language is shared the more alive it becomes, using it as a weapon to express a patriarchal insult is common, hijacking it to bring up the question. Who fucks a father? Why do we think of a younger girl? To which extent the state leaders want to appear like fathers for the population and their sexual life goes under scrutiny?
At the Venice Biennale 2024, your Foreigners Everywhere series became central to the exhibition. How do you reflect on that project’s legacy in the context of Show Less?
Show Less is an entirely different project that revolves explicitly around patriarchy and its affects. Foreigners Everywhere is a series of works that tackles the absurdity of racism and underlines the foundational importance of migration within every culture and every historical time. Being a foreigner is an occasion to illuminate conventions and habits with a different light and radically transform our awareness of natives or our newfound self as a person coming from somewhere else. Our belonging to our own national culture and identity is marbled with foreignness, identity isn’t a monolithic experience but a dynamic form. In the last Venice Biennale we have presented the first gender neutral foreigners everywhere in Italian and this gesture has underlined our attention towards the specificity of a gendered experience of migration for women, gay and trans people that already endure different levels of foreignness and exclusion everywhere at home.
Looking ahead to the Rome iteration in 2027, how do you imagine Show Less evolving across time and place, especially in dialogue with shifting political realities?
This is yet to be seen.