From the 1960s until today, the notion of territory has profoundly evolved. With the development of a more complex, politicized, globalized world, the territory has only recently recovered its need for narratives, fictions, myths, and legends that it seemed to have almost abandoned to the administration. The territory in the political, cartographic, hierarchical sense, reflecting control, limit, and the patriarchal authority, sees itself confronted in the history of the art to a vision rather linked to the aesthetic experience that one makes of it.
The intimate and imaginary universes which fill the space replace the marked out and protected, rigid and functional territories. The territory also becomes a space of freedom, where the spectators meet a work as much as themselves.
From Ana Mendieta's early Siluetas to Tacita Dean's videos, women artists have always been pioneers in the mutation of the notion of territory, both artistically and ontologically. Whether linked to the body, ritual, memory or dream, the territory opened by their works has often metamorphosed into a refuge of memories, a hybrid remnant between hope and history.
It is this very territory, which links the mind to matter and the soul to the objects of nature, that the works of the four artists presented here attempt to explore: Mariana Hahn, Ilanit Illouz, Victoire Inchauspé and Corinne Mariaud.
The exhibition presented in the space of HdM Gallery in Pantin thus highlights the work of these contemporary artists with multiple practices, which are expanding their territories and their materials more every day.