"The work of Claire Fontaine is filled with rich and complex objects and images whose status and meaning is constantly in flux. There are jokes. There is a handwritten text in watercolour, copied out again and again, freeing the writer from the injustices of their ancestors (I AM FREE, it concludes). There is work riffing on Marcel Duchamp's moustachioed and goateed Mona Lisa, swapping his ribald but puzzling 1919 caption LHOOQ with LGBTQ+."
"At the 2024 Venice Biennale, Claire Fontaine's neon signs reading Foreigners Everywhere appeared and reappeared, written in dozens of languages, around the Giardini and the Arsenale, and also lent the biennale its overall title, turning a familiar kneejerk complaint into a celebration of difference. A new neon sign reading FATHERFUCKER, suspended and glowing behind the window of Mimosa House, opens their biggest London show to date."
Claire Fontaine produces mutable objects and images that shift meaning through repetition, appropriation, and humor. Handwritten watercolour text is copied to enact liberation from ancestral injustices. Works reframe historical images, as when Marcel Duchamp's LHOOQ is transformed into LGBTQ+. Book jackets addressing Palestine's ruined ecology and post-7 October visual activism are bound around stone blocks as literal, crashing messages. Neon signs proclaiming Foreigners Everywhere circulated in multiple languages at the 2024 Venice Biennale, reframing complaint as celebration. A neon reading FATHERFUCKER confronts spectators in a London window, provoking reactions ranging from selfies to formal complaints. The show centers on structural injustice, including patriarchy and its effects.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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