BIEL/BIENNE.- Continuing her work on the creation and circulation of images, the French artist Mimosa Echard (*1986) transforms the «white cube» of the Salle Poma into a conceptual cave. Numerous mythologies are invoked within its walls – prehistoric motifs; New York’s Times Square; Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt; or the global phenomenon of the Spice Girls, among others. «Dolls’ Theater» thus appears as an entanglement of these heterogeneous spaces and figures, an allegorical grotto in which the artist explores the relationships between perception and violence, pleasure and control, origins and ephemerality.
Installed at the entrance of the Salle Poma, the video Tide (2026) shows close-ups of advertising screens in Times Square. A historic district of entertainment and pleasure, the crossroad has undergone significant transformation since the 1980s: porn cinemas and peep shows have been replaced by monumental LED screens broadcasting advertisements in continuous loops. In Tide, the commodities are no longer recognisable due to the extreme enlargement of the footage shot on a smartphone. The artist instead focuses on the raw material of attention, its abstract texture: rhythm, flow, cut.
The series of tableaux Withdrawals (2026) extends Mimosa Echard’s reflection on the screen as a medium for visual information. Made from a patchwork of fabrics that block electromagnetic waves, such as Wi-Fi, 5G and microwaves, these works show yellowish green traces of oxidisation, rendering the impenetrable surface vulnerable and porous. The negative handprints that appear evoke the walls of prehistoric caves, composed on square formats of increasing scale. They oscillate between fragment and totality, mystical vision and shop window – one sometimes notices the lace-like imprint of the gloves used by the artist. This ambiguity recalls the enclosed architecture of Parisian arcades, whose fantasies «modernise the universe» according to Walter Benjamin in his «Arcades Project» (1939).
This cave-like setting intersects with other spatial-surfaces present across the three sculptures that structure the Salle Poma. In the assemblage Diane (2026), named after the Roman mythological figure, Echard reconstructs within a server rack the memory of a cave she decorated at the age of twelve. She uses the same materials: shotgun cartridges found on the ground, pocket mirrors, Spice Girls fan imagery, and limestone pebbles, brought together in a hybrid and imaginary space, between projection room and memorial altar.
Bébé Marie (after Joseph Cornell) (2024) is a cover version of a famous composition by the US-American Surrealist, permanently exhibited at MoMA in New York. Echard transforms the image of the Victorian doll lost in a forest into a pop astronaut sheltered in a microwave, retaining the original sense of diffuse and complex unease.
This relationship between femininity and eeriness continues in Matrix (2026), an enlarged and modified reproduction of a straw purchased by the artist in a New York sex shop. The vulva asserts itself as an ambiguous presence, alternately suggesting an eye, a face, or a torso, blurring conventional boundaries between body, object, and image. With this contemporary Venus, Echard links capitalist consumer culture to a long tradition of representations of the female sex, engraved on cave walls since time immemorial.
Together, these works form the set of Mimosa Echard’s «Dolls’ Theater». The title, borrowed from a miniature formation of stalactites in the US state of New Mexico, designates a space that is both conceptual and real. If the theatre is above all a «place where one looks», Echard invites us to contemplate the shape of myths woven into the texture of contemporary reality – its rhythm, its void, its fetishes.
