Corps à l’œuvre brings together at Galerie Maubert the works of five women artists, where the body appears as a site of experience and transformation: no longer a biological given, but a sensitive material traversed by gestures, affects, relationships, and forces. An “embodied,” “lived” body — a site of knowledge, action, and creation, far from representations that confine it to a fixed form made available to the gaze.

After several decades during which dominant feminist approaches often prioritized strict equality between individuals, sometimes at the expense of questions of embodiment [1], recent theoretical developments suggest a return to bodily experience [2]. In the post-#MeToo era, but also in the wake of intersectional, ecofeminist, queer, and post-humanist approaches, the body has become a privileged field of analysis for understanding power relations, embodied memories, vulnerabilities, desires, and capacities for action. This theoretical shift, which seeks to move beyond old oppositions between mind and flesh, finds powerful resonance in contemporary artistic practices, where new models of “embodiment” are emerging.

The exhibition presents various forms of expression — sculpture, photography, installation, and drawing — in which the body is experienced as an active and creative force that revalues sensory experience: a corporeality no longer endured or objectified, but one capable of tracing its own contours within social and artistic spheres.

The notion of the “lived body” — first formulated in phenomenology, notably in Merleau-Ponty [3], and later revisited by many feminist philosophers from a corporeal perspective [4] — resurfaces strongly in Iris Marion Young’s essay Throwing Like a Girl [5]. Reflecting on the alienation of feminine embodiment under patriarchy, Young observes that individuals are taught from childhood to inhabit space differently: girls do not learn to mobilize the full amplitude of their bodies, they restrict their gestures, and move within a limited perimeter of action. As a result, Young writes, “we lack total confidence in the ability of our bodies to carry us toward our aims” [6], highlighting a form of internalized restraint specific to women.

This perspective casts a new light on the nearly systematic stillness of Giacometti’s female figures — who, unlike the “walking men”, seem eternally frozen in their verticality [7]. In a new series produced at the invitation of the Institut Giacometti, Agnès Geoffray revisits the elongated silhouette of Giacometti’s figures and infuses an unprecedented mobility into the female body across a sequence of ten photographs: the figure advances, wavers, arches, bends, unfolds — gradually reclaiming space through a succession of gestures, escaping immobility to assert an active, unbound presence. 

Young also notes that women are socialized be constantly aware of their bodies and anticipate the gaze of others; they live under the constant threat of bodily intrusion and are exposed to a reifying, sexualizing touch, which induces heightened, almost defensive vigilance [8]. 

This tactile tension resonates within Elizaveta Konovalova’s installation. On a silk veil, an enlarged detail of a sculpture shows a hand reaching toward a thigh. The finger seems to graze the skin, yet only a small support dowel actually connects the two parts: touch is suspended, both suggested and prevented. This fragment appears isolated, as if one had reframed, Renaissance-style, the image to extract the zones deemed most compelling. Daniel Arasse noted, regarding this practice, that “the gaze touches artworks,” that it can modify, cut, or alter them [9] ; proof that seeing already constitutes a form of contact. The presence of this tiny piece of marble also reveals the sculpture’s vulnerability: dowels are used to reinforce fragile areas — most often fingers — and prevent breakage. In its apparent fragility, Konovalova’s installation seems to enact a defensive strategy; the sandbags holding the assembly in tension evoke the protective devices amassed around sculptures during wartime or natural disaster. The body appears simultaneously exposed and protected, in an ambiguous zone where the thresholds of contact are renegotiated.

This notion of protection reappears in a new series by Nathalie Talec, Bandage. Since the 1980s, the artist has explored ideas of survival, refuge, and shelter. Here she presents blood-red silhouettes whose bodies overlap with bandages — at once wounded, cared for, and reassembled. In another series, Anonymous (no)body, inspired by the hybrid humanoid forms of Inuit sculpture, the artist merges the body with the mineral. In a kind of intimate relationship to nature, arms embrace coral-like shapes, lean upon them, or surrender to them. Bodily boundaries dissolve, revealing continuities and interconnections that redefine the connections between femininity and nature.

This relationship to the living continues in Yosra Mojtahedi’s drawings and installations. An Iranian artist who grew up in a political context where the representation of the body is strictly regulated, she develops a sensual, tactile, sometimes erotic language as a political response to censorship. The forms she creates oscillate between organism and artefact, blurring the boundary between living and non-living, real and imaginary. By creating worlds in which species, materials, and genders intertwine, Mojtahedi expresses a unity of the living, where corporeality becomes a vector of resistance and emancipation.

Angélique Jacquemoire explores another form of embodiment: that of images themselves. Using found photographs — negatives, slides, silver prints — and VHS footage often destined for oblivion, she reveals the fragile persistence of the figures they contain. After rephotographing these fragments with flash, the artist transfers them in oil on canvas, capturing the bursts of light, shiny areas, and reflections that disrupt their legibility. Her paintings become layered temporal strata in which the fixity of represented bodies falters.The flash of the artist’s camera seems to dazzle the faces — sometimes nearly erased — suspended at the threshold of the visible. Bodies persist through snippets and afterimages, as if resisting their own disappearance.

The exhibition thus outlines a reflection on embodiment rooted in artistic practice itself. The gathered artists shift the boundaries between movement and stillness, touch and withdrawal, human and non-human, presence and disappearance. Their works give form to a feminine corporeality no longer assigned, immobilized, or objectified, but lived, active, shifting, capable of redrawing its own contours. The lived body — mobile, tactile, hybrid, spectral — becomes a site of creation, resistance, and transformation of the sensible. A space where a new politics of embodiment is invented, within matter itself.

Jeanne Ferrari

[1] The notion of embodiment lies at the heart of an “embodied” feminism, which refocuses attention on women’s lived experience. The aim is not to essentialize their condition, but to highlight the objectification to which their bodies are subjected, while affirming the emancipatory trajectories that make the body a site of freedom and agency.

See Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, Un corps à soi, Seuil, coll. ‘‘La Couleur des idées’’, 2021.

[2] During the Second Wave of feminism (1960s–1980s), an increasingly dominant “universalist” approach argued that one cannot claim equality between individuals while simultaneously positing the existence of specific female experiences. Within this framework, the body was understood as a vector of masculine domination, from which women ought to free themselves.

At the turn of the 2000s, this conception was reinforced by the theoretical developments of the Third Wave, which tended toward denying naturalized bodily difference in order to expose gendered hierarchies.

While other feminist currents had, since the 1970s, examined lived embodiment, sexuality, maternity, or embodied identities, the 2010s saw a renewed interest in approaches that connect the intimate experience of the body to the analysis of social structures of domination.

See Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, ‘‘Qu’est-ce que le féminisme phénoménologique ?’’, Cités, 2018/1, no. 73, pp. 81-82. 

[3]  “My existence as subjectivity is one with my existence as a body.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘‘Tel’’, 2012, p. 470.

[4] Clara Chaffardon, ‘‘La description de la corporéité féminine dans On Female Body Experience : de la critique de l’aliénation à la réappropriation de son expérience’’, Alter, 30 | 2022, p. 109

[5] Iris Marion Young (1949-2006), On Female Body Experience. ‘‘Throwing like a girl’’ and other essays, Oxford University Press, 2005.

[6] Quoted in Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, ‘‘Le féminisme phénoménologique d’Iris Marion Young. Tenir ensemble le concept de corps vécu et la notion de genre’’, In: Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Third series, vol. 116, no. 4, 2018, p.502 

[7] Although Giacometti’s first walking figure is a woman (Femme qui marche I, 1932), female figures in motion remain rare in his work and most often retain a strict verticality — in contrast to male figures, which are more frequently inclined or dynamic.

[8] Alia Al-Saji, “Bodies and sensings: On the uses of Husserlian phenomenology for feminist theory“, In: Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 43, 2010, pp. 13-37.

[9] “The gaze touches artworks, and the proof lies in the fact that they have been cut up, repainted, burned, etc., because the gaze can touch and be touched.” 

Quoted in Érika Wicky, ‘‘L’œuvre d’art à l’épreuve du cadrage photographique’’, in Livio Belloï et Maud Hagelstein (eds.), La mécanique du détail, ENS Éditions, Lyon, 2017, p. 175.