PARIS.- Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research opened Temple of Love, a solo show and new commission by Gaëlle Choisne (1985, France) consisting in a sculptural installation addressing the concept of love.

At Bétonsalon, Gaëlle Choisne explores the potentiality of love as an attitude and a form of resistance, a channeling source of profoundly political actions. In Temple of Love, the artist considers love as a social matter, subject to power struggles and a catalyst for courage and transgression. In this new body of work, she presents sculptures, textile banners, and a feast of oysters as offerings, summoning the subversively erotic Babylonian goddess Ishtar and the cigarettes of Haitian voodoo spirit Erzulie Dantor. The artist makes use of the language of architecture, organic shapes, permaculture and an abundance of textile materials to compose a collective living habitat. Gaëlle Choisne reappropriates the features of the temple and those of the exhibition space: a place for congregation, sharing, and refuge where gaze and discourse are created and experienced.

A sanctuary, a place of life and encounters, the space of Temple of Love created by Gaëlle Choisne welcomes, from September through December 2018, a series of temporary invitations, performances, in situ interventions, workshops and conferences. Named “LUVs” according to the neologism reshaping the term “love” to deprive it of its severity, as a series of flirts, these events will complete and interrogate the purpose of the exhibition, offering multiple, confusing and mixed influences.

Gaëlle Choisne (1985, France) graduated from the National School of Fine Arts of Lyon. In January 2017, she was admitted into the Rijksakademie, after a one-year residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Her work has been featured in biennials, group shows and workshops, such as at the Beirut Art Center for the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017), MAC Lyon (2016), the Lyon Biennial (2015) and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2018).

The artist addresses the issues of disaster, the exploitation of resources and the remains of colonialism in dynamic installations which mutate their environment. She unravels these themes through a series of workshops with school students in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) and is currently focusing on a project involving the manipulation of raw materials to elaborate socially and environmentally-conscious urbanism methods.

Gaëlle Choisne is represented by the untilthen gallery in Paris, which welcomed her last solo show Hybris in 2018.