Gisèle Vienne in Berlin
Haus am Waldsee, Berlin
12 September 2024 – 12 January 2025
On 12 September 2024, the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin opened its new exhibition on Gisèle Vienne titled This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play and which Phileas has co-produced. It assembles life-size puppets and dolls created by the artist over the last twenty years as an installation alongside a body of her photographs. In form of a puppet show, the installation was purposefully constructed for the architecture of the Haus am Waldsee. This creates a tension between self-determination and heteronomy in the context of language and sound, which stands in contrast to the silence and immobility of the exhibited dolls. Curated by Anna Gritz, the exhibition is one of three simultaneous presentations of Vienne's work in Berlin this autumn, together with the Georg Kolbe Museum and Sophiensæle.
Over the last 20 years, French-Austrian artist, choreographer and director Gisèle Vienne (born 1976 in Charleville-Mézières) has created a complex body of work that often takes as its starting point the age of adolescence; the transformative time where you are not quite adult, but no longer just a child, and the hopes and anxieties that accompany this period. Her work also looks into the role assigned to youth in contemporary society, and how this impacts social dynamics. By incorporating dolls and puppets in her works, her exhibitions and performances often have a dreamy or nightmarish quality. Vienne has had solo and group exhibitions at the Grand Palais, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. She regularly performs at internationally renowned dance festivals, including Impulstanz, Vienna.
This is Gisèle Vienne’s first collaboration with Phileas.
