"The body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle continuously alive, animating and nourishing it from within.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
In 2024, Faire Corps, the 14th exhibition of The Villa Datris Foundation, explores visions of the “body” through the works of 60 established and emerging artists, both French and international. In the Foundation’s human-scale spaces and in its gardens, visitors will explore various facets of this classic but relevant subject.
Since the 19th century, and in keeping with profound mutations in society, representations of the "classical" body and the "ideal" nude have been increasingly called into question. In this exhibition, we explore the body as an object of concern for racialized, feminist, and gendered representations.
Faire Corps also critiques the transcendent physical body, a site central to capitalism, along with the body’s role in social injustice, immigration, bioethics, cybernetics, wars, and contagions, as well as the body as a militating ecological force.
