Hannah Villiger's tribute exhibition at the Center Pompidou
A thumb, a clenched fist, azure eyes and a few freckles... What if we took the time to piece together the strange puzzle left by Hannah Villiger? We are obviously not the only ones who want to put the pieces back together; the Center Pompidou also attempts to paint a fragmentary portrait of an elusive artist, combining scraps of Hannah with each other until each part of her naked body is identified. Should we see in this immodest, slightly narcissistic album signs of identity protest or feminist demands? Nothing is less sure. Unlike her sisters Valie Export, Cindy Sherman or Orlan, Hannah Villiger uses Polaroids, not as a photographer, but as a sculptor. Facing the lens, the artist puts himself on stage, elevating his own fleshly envelope to the rank of unique and universal material. She experiments, choosing close-ups and enlargements to flood the space. The photographer lets the camera shape her body, plunging it into darkness or dressing it with a flash of white light. Its milky skin then becomes limestone, opal, marble. Imagined as a real body-to-body encounter with matter, the exhibition thus makes the boundaries with the flesh disappear to make way for the shattered fragments of a reconstituted statue.










