Émilie Pitoiset

“My work revolves around the disequilibrium of that last moment between the quiet point and fall, the moment where movement leads from one point to another. This phenomenon is an intrinsic part of the produced forms that are abstracted from situations that tilt over due to their narrative instability.” Émilie Pitoiset

  • MANIAC, 2023, Galerie de l’UQAM, Momenta Biennale Montreal CAN

  • MANIAC, 2020, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • MANIAC, 2020, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • La Pleine Lune Dort La Nuit, 2020, Château de Rochechouart, Rochechouart / Photo: Aurélien Mole

  • Tainted Love, 2018, Confort Moderne, Poitiers / Photo: Pierre Antoine

  • Trois fois rien, 2019, Centre National de la Danse, Pantin / Photo: Marc Domage

  • Trois Fois Rien, 2019, Centre National de la Danse, Pantin / Photo: Marc Domage

  • Rehearsal, 2018, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong

  • Rehearsal, 2018, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong

  • It’s all the gold which i have, 2014, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • Les actions silencieuses, 2013, Frac Champagne Ardenne, Reims

  • Les actions silencieuses, 2013, Frac Champagne Ardenne, Reims

  • Les actions silencieuses, 2013, Frac Champagne Ardenne, Reims

  • Giselle, 2012, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • Vous arrivez trop tard, Cérémonie, 2012, Les Églises, Chelles / Photo: Aurélien Mole

  • Von A nach B, 2010, Bielefeld Kunstverein, Bielefeld / Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer

  • Bild für Bild Collection of Centre Pompidou, 2010, Museum am Ostwalt, Dortmund

  • Comme on fait disparaître les miroirs, 2010, Palais de Tokyo, Module, Paris / Photo: André Morin

  • Ordinary Experience, Beau Window #3, 2009, Confort Moderne, Poitiers FR/ Photo: Patricia Combacal

About the artist

Émilie Pitoiset produces artworks that ‘activate’ a series of characters and fictions through an on-going narrative that deals with the exhibition as a format, including elements such as film and performance. In her work, she analyses episodes of popular culture spanning from the medieval period to today, trying to understand the urgency that exists in times of social, economic and political crises to produce new forms of existence through music and dance. She also delves into the impact of music and club culture, when bodies meet and shapes start shifting, working across several media, from dance and music performances to photography, video and installations.

Her work is infused by figures such as Woolf, Ackerman, Robbe-Grillet, Flaubert, Huysmans and Fassbinder that she mirrors and leads astray into a subtle “eroticisation” of the everyday life. She plays with uncanny scenarios that unfold a surrealistic visual grammar that is both enigmatic, ‘noir’ and decadent.

Her images and sculpted or painted objects often conceal convex narratives summoning the view into a role game whose scenario has not yet been revealed. Everything here is dual and unstable: the exhibition, seemingly immobile, becomes the locus of a scene being played, or already played, in which objects become actors. In a mix of fetishisation and embodiment, these ‘transfer objects’ contain repetitions of past acts and latent scenarios for fictional rituals. In her room-filling installations as well as in each individual work she raises the questions of how we can work with ‘desire’, ‘the mechanism of absence’, the ‘physical unconscious’ and nevertheless the ‘missing act’? And how can we recapture the language of eroticism?

“Emilie Pitoiset’s work builds itself with precision and singularity through a series of paradoxes that reveal her centres of interest, and that are as universal as the notions of adding and subtracting, falling and balancing, documentary and fiction, symmetry and repetition, attraction and repulsion…” Claire Staebler, 2011

Émilie Pitoiset, MANIAC, 2020, video still from episode 1

Publications