Thomas Hirschhorn

Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal

Josée Bélisle

'Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake' is a monumental installation that would resemble a topsy-turvy reference centre except for the presence of a gigantic cake and with 12 spoons at its core. Modeled after souvenir spoons, they are emblematic of individuals or entities the artist associates with failed utopias: Mies van der Rohe, Rosa Luxemburg, Malevich, Nietzsche, Venice, China, the exhibition of degenerate art held by the Nazis in 1937 and the Chicago Bulls basketball team. In this installation, the artist offers a space for reflection on the an overabundance of information juxtaposed with the urgent question of global hunger. 'Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake', a recent acquisition of the Muse dart contemporain, was shown at the Chicago Art Institute and at the Muse national dart moderne/Centre Pompidou.

Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake

Wangechi Mutu

Since her appearance in the late 1990s, Wangechi Mutu's collage-drawings depicting black women, tampered with and prey to strange bodily mutations, have generated much debate and interest on the international art scene. The broad range of raw materials she uses - magazines on fashion and current events, geography and ethnography, motorcycles and pornography - allows her to tackle the stereotypes of media representation, particularly of women, head on. While presenting an overview of new and recent work, this publication is centered on the installation Moth Girls, 2010, recently acquired by the Musée. In the recurrence of a half-human, half-animal, female figure, the product of an extreme hybridization, the work reintroduces the notion of taxonomy, along with the volatile notion of classification and hierarchization of species and, by extension, peoples and races.

Josée Bélisle

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