Gisèle Vienne
12th SITE SANTA FE, New Mexico, USA
28 June 2025 – 13 January 2026
The SITE Santa Fe International was founded in 1995 as a contemporary art exhibition of international significance. A guest curator is invited for each edition to develop a concept that responds to the rich local history of New Mexico, while also engaging with current international artistic concerns. Its 12th edition in 2025 will be curated by Italian curator Cecilia Alemani. Inspired by literature, it will see contemporary artists engaging with the biographies of local individuals to explore personal storytelling and the intimate, human side of art.
Gisèle Vienne (born 1976) is a French-Austrian artist, choreographer, and director. Her work embraces sculpture and installation, photography, film, choreography, and theatre, and questions the existing social, political, and cultural structures and norms. Coming from the tradition of figurative sculpture, she creates life-sized teenage dolls to be the protagonists in her photography, films, and theatrical productions. These characters are in their adolescence, the transformative time where you are not quite an adult, but no longer just a child; their eyes stare into space, their faces keep a lethargic expression, and their movements seem frozen. Using elements of horror, Vienne’s stagings often have a dreamy or nightmarish quality. Over the past twenty years, her work has toured throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States and been exhibited in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
This is her second collaboration with Phileas, following her solo exhibition at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, in 2024.
