For Nastasia Meyrat activism and artistic creation are intimately linked.  Motivated by the pressing need for women’s empowerment and thus the freedom to define themselves, the artist creates by proclamation in a combat against domestication of spirit and thought. The An Alter Manifesto installation is an arrangement of self-portraits in space.  “We are six,” she writes, “my sculptures are my bodies, my body is plural.  Together we are an ‘alter’ community which believes in the possibility of acting, even activism, with and by art.”  These provocative personages, their deformed bodies  adorned with outsized cigarettes, assert a combative, grotesque and poetic presence.

Passing over the usual dichotomy between artistic works and common objects, between art and craft, Xenia Laffely’s work freely combines different approaches and etiquettes.  Whether digital or craft, painting or embroidery, the method is at the heart of her thinking.  Seductive as well as disturbing, her compositions are  self-representations in which the body multiplies by using division and mise en abîme techniques.  Xénia Laffely approaches female power through her affinity with the history of witchcraft.  Snakes, cats and claws unsurprisingly make frequent appearances in her work.  Through a dreamlike and surrealist vocabulary the artist mutates the body, playing at the frontier between intimacy and exposure, interiority and exhibition.