Exhibitions

Opening on Friday 6 November 2026 at 6.00 pm
Curator: Hélène Audiffren

Carré d’Art – Nîmes Museum of Contemporary Art is dedicating a major exhibition to the French visual artist and performer Marie-Ange Guilleminot. Entitled MA, the space that connects, this exhibition traces the full scope of her work, from the 1980s to the present day. MA signifies the interval, the space between two things, the silence between two sounds, the pause between two gestures, the void between two forms. Distance or duration – not those that separate, but those that connect, allowing the elements to breathe. The MA is this interval, charged with potential and meaning, a living space that leaves room for imagination, perception and experience.

Marie-Ange Guilleminot’s practice, which blends sculpture, installation, performance, video and drawing, often places the body at the centre of experiences based on touch, movement, transformation and the relationship with others.

Her works revolve around a three-way relationship: the artist’s ‘I’, the audience’s ‘you’, and the transitional object – the work of art. This triangular relationship triggers a dialectic between curiosity, seduction and frustration: curiosity draws the visitor into a tactile engagement with the work, whilst its sensual dimension creates an attraction that comes up against the impossibility of fully grasping the other’s body. The artist thus challenges the traditional separation between artwork, artist and audience, by transforming bodily and relational experience into a genuine artistic medium.

Marie-Ange Guilleminot brings these objects to life during performances—often filmed—to demonstrate their function, as if to provide the viewer with a user guide. In each area of the museum, the works will be displayed and brought to life through the video archive, guided tours by museum educators or special events.

Born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1960, Marie-Ange Guilleminot lives and works in Paris.

Having graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice in 1981, Marie-Ange Guilleminot reappropriates objects, diverting them from their usual function. Whilst this work, created primarily using neutral-coloured textiles, is reminiscent of certain Body Art performances, the work of the Supports-Surfaces group, and the folding technique of the painter Simon Hantaï, it emphasises above all the poetic nature of the creative gesture, highlighted by the modesty of the materials. This gesture (embroidery, weaving, folding), as seen in the ‘Salon de transformation’ performed in public, in front of the lens or the camera, also explores the relationship between the body and the intimate on the one hand, and the social sphere on the other; all the viewer’s senses are engaged through transitional and convertible objects (Le Chapeauvie, 1994). Since 1992, the artist has also been creating a series of bespoke dresses that reveal certain physical features (navel, moles). The Marriage of Saint-Maur in Saint-Gallen (1994), celebrated during a flight, takes the unmarried artist—dressed in a white gown weighted down with strings of lead beads—from one man at departure to a second upon arrival, with ‘a third underlying and absent’; a book of men’s handkerchiefs embroidered with poems by Pierre Giquel forms her trousseau and offers a reflection on solitude and the absence of the other.