Curated by Ruba Katrib
Claire Fontaine is not just a conspicuously feminine name for an artists’ collaboration. “She” cannot be mistaken for a woman, because she is already something else: a brand of French notebook, more ready-made than fictional character. Since 2004, Fontaine has, with her Paris-based “assistants,” Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, produced textual and object-based inquiries into the legacies of the left, most explicitly May ’68 and Italian movements of the 1970s, in an almost forensic search for the secret freedoms that might be cultivated under capitalism, a search whose tactics they refer to as “human strike”—radical secession from much that comprises contemporary subjecthood (work, consumption, and so-called individuality). The artist’s first-ever retrospective features works in various media including smoke, neon, and print, as well as a “moving image toolbox” of Fontaine’s own filmic inspirations.
