PARIS.- Women House is the meeting of two ideas: gender— the female—and space—the domestic. Architecture and public space have long been considered masculine, while the domestic space has been the prison or refuge of women; however, this historical evidence is not destiny, as the exhibition Women House shows. In over 1000 square metres of gallery space and in some of Monnaie de Paris’ courtyards, it brings together 39 women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries who take up this complex subject and place women at the centre of a history from which they were excluded. After its stop in Paris, Women House will travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. beginning 8 March 2018.

The challenge of finding a space to work in her own home was theorised by Virginia Woolf in 1929 in her essay «A Room of One’s Own», as she encouraged women to find a room that they could lock themselves in without being disturbed. This is the starting point of Women House, whose initiative follows thematically from the 1970s—when women artists rebelled against the absence of physical space for exhibition or work and the lack of symbolic space of recognition—up to recent works produced by a young generation of women artists.

The exhibition’s eight chapters display the complexity of possible viewpoints on the subject: they are not only feminist (Desperate Housewives) but also poetic (A Room of One’s Own), political (Mobile Homes) and nostalgic (Doll’s House). If the house is a symbol of confinement and alienation for some artists, it becomes for others a source of inspiration and self-reinvention. In fact, these women artists turned the house upside-down: the symbol of confinement becomes that of the construction of identity. Intimacy becomes political, private space becomes public space, the body becomes architecture. Depending on the cultural context and generation of the artists, the house develops into a house-body, a house-country, even a house-world when the question of nomadism and forced exile arises, which occurs historically alongside violence and war.

The project began seven years ago, during the exhibition “elles@centrepompidou”, from the observation that two of the foremost contemporary women artists, Louise Bourgeois and Niki de Saint Phalle, had devoted a significant part of their artwork to the “woman-house”. This series of works became the starting point for greater research and was transformed gradually into one of the sections of the exhibition.

Other recurring themes shared by these women artists were built progressively into the seven other sections: the everyday rituals of domestic life both past and present, the confrontation of scale, the desire to preserve a memory of buildings otherwise doomed to destruction and oblivion, etc.

Laure Tixier and Elsa Sahal (France). Some names are known (Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint Phalle, Martha Rosler, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, Rachel Whiteread) while others have been recently rediscovered as part of a rereading of art history that seeks to establish gender parity (Birgit Jürgenssen, Ana Vieira, Letitia Parente, Heidi Bucher).

Monumental works such as Nana Maison II (1966 – 1987) by Niki de Saint Phalle, Teapot (2010) by Joana Vasconcelos or Hair Saloon (2000) by Shen Yuan are exhibited in the courtyards of Monnaie de Paris, on a route between the Pont des Arts to the Pont Neuf, accessible to the public and free of charge starting in Fall 2017.

An exhibition curated by Camille Morineau, Director of Exhibitions and Collections of Monnaie de Paris and Lucia Pesapane, Exhibition curator at Monnaie de Paris.