Jenkin van Zyl at Montpellier Contemporain

Under the Skin, Montpellier, France

This summer MO.CO. Panacée presents a group exhibition exploring monstrosity, the monstrous, and mutant forms in contemporary art. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, we live in a time of monsters. Gramsci may have been reflecting on interregnum, a moment of legal and political in-betweenness in which legality becomes suspended, and which, in his case, preceded the rise of fascism in the 20th century. Yet the present also does not seem immune to what can only be described as the monstrous, without, however, being able to define it more precisely. According to the teratologist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the monster represents everything that a society tries to reject or suppress. It is an error, difference, deviance, excess.

While these terms were initially ascribed to monstrosity as a biological anomaly, viewed from a scientific and medical perspective, they now extend more broadly to the notion of the social monster: a being, an idea, that reflects the current state of a society and its collective imaginary. Through nearly 80 works by over 20 artists, dating from the 1970s to today, the exhibition Under the Skin does not claim to diagnose monstrosity, but it delves into Pandora’s box to reveal that the monstrous is often found not at such a distant remove as one might imagine, easily inhabiting one side of the epidermis as the other.

Akin to the abject, the monstrous disrupts identity, established systems and order. It has no respect for boundaries, positions or norms.

Through an immersive and labyrinthine approach, Under the Skin plays with the unconscious of our fears and desires. The exhibition is another opportunity for MO.CO. to affirm its support for artists by producing new works, particularly those by Montpellier-based artists recently graduated from MO.CO. Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts, such as Nuria Mokhtar and Arthur Monteillet, or, in the case of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, by creating ambitious adaptations of existing work. Several artists will be presented for the first time in a French institution, including Sue Coe, Keunmin Lee, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Brilant Milazimi, Sibylle Ruppert and Michelle Uckotter.

The exhibition is supported by Fluxus Art Projects and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Artists

Albrecht Becker, Kévin Blinderman, Julien Ceccaldi, Sue Coe, Julian Farade, Dorota Gawęda et Eglė Kulbokaitė, Penny Goring, Tirdad Hashemi, Richard Hawkins, Augustin Katz, Keunmin Lee, Tala Madani, Stéphane Mandelbaum, Mónica Mays, Brilant Milazimi, Nuria Mokhtar, Arthur Monteillet, Moor Mother avec Glenn Espinosa et Cauleen Smith, Ulrike Ottinger, Lili Reynaud Dewar, James Richards et Steve Reinke, Sibylle Ruppert, Ebun Sodipo, Ceija Stojka, Michelle Uckotter, Jenkin van Zyl et Issy Wood.

Curators

Anya Harrison, Curator, with Alexis Loisel-Montambaux, Exhibition Assistant.

Jenkin van Zyl, Sweat Carousel, production still, 2024. © Jenkin van Zyl. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti.