On 19 October at 5 pm, the group exhibition Vers la paix perpétu-aile(s) / The Wings of Peace opened its doors. Five artists of different generations took part in a project, approaching peace through images of war: ORLAN, Émeric Lhuisset, Léa Le Bricomte, Oleg Kulik and Esther Ferrer.
From rue de Turenne, passers-by first see ORLAN screaming. In the street window is displayed one of the large-scale self-portraits from her series Nous sommes inconsolables: the artist’s face and hands pressed to her head appear among torn fragments of images, as if through shattered glass. Part of that is actually real.
“While creating an exhibition about resisting violence, we found ourselves near the epicentre of the demonstrations in Paris,” says Sarah Vinitz, founder of Tora and Art Foundation. “Our display window was slightly damaged. We preserved the crack: reality entered the exhibition space and gave our statement new strength.”
The crack reflects the idea behind the group show. Organised by Tora and Art Foundation with the French cultural platform Bien En Place, the exhibition does not offer an image of peace as calm or comfort – in its traditional interpretation. Moreover, almost every artwork in the exhibition space deals with war, power and violence. The project’s curator, the art historian Jean-Baptiste Chantoiseau, explains why. “In a world where war is omnipresent, talking about peace without confronting the reality of war, its violence and the threats it poses, would, to me, be an unrealistic approach,” he says.
When you enter the gallery space, at the centre of the room you meet the white sculpture created by ORLAN that inspired the exhibition title. Vers la paix perpétu-aile(s), made in marble powder with the workshops of the Grand Palais RMN, shows the artist herself in a pleated robe and a pointed headdress, releasing doves with both hands. As ORLAN mentions, it grew out of a 2022 performance in Mérida, Mexico, where she bought a dove at the market and set it free.
“ORLAN is the centrifugal force of our project, carrying its message beyond the exhibition space,” says Vinitz. “Her presence brings this conviction into focus: art can open a space for dialogue where conflict has closed one.”
ORLAN’s other artworks presented within the exhibition are less gentle. L’Origine de la guerre is a lenticular photomontage that replaces the woman in Courbet’s L’Origine du monde with a man, in the same size and frame. As the viewer moves, Courbet’s artwork turns into its male counterpart. Inside the gallery is also showcased a second self-portrait from Nous sommes inconsolables, in which her face splits into a skull and a scream. This series is currently on view at the Venice Biennale and comes from filmed performances in which ORLAN screams and cries. “It is not a resigned complaint, but an active anger, a political anger,” she says. “Art is on the side of sensitivity, nuance and questioning. We are not on the side of violence, nor on the side of power. We are pacifists.”
Under exposed brick, one of the largest photographs in the show belongs to Émeric Lhuisset. J’entends au loin la réponse des cosaques restages well-known classic Ilya Repin’s Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks with fighters depicted in the field: helmets, rifles, a dog, someone checking a phone, the same loud laughter around a table.
In front of it, on two pedestals, are positioned Léa Le Bricomte’s Spirit Houses, representing miniature palaces built from cartridge cases, while their towers are made of bullets. Moving further in the exhibition space, visitors discover her Dripping Medals running down a white wall: more than dozens of First World War ribbons with their medals, hanging at different lengths like paint dripping in a Morris Louis canvas.
Against the one more old stone wall, next to the window hang two artworks of Oleg Kulik from The Russian, a series he first showed in 1999 at Regina Gallery in Moscow and dedicated to Leo Tolstoy. Kulik, largely known across Europe for his performances as a man-dog, turned here to the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realist painting, creating scenes that look like documentary, almost monochrome photographs but could never have been taken. In the horizontal At Home, a unique piece, a bulldog stares at the viewer from a dark peasant interior, beside a stove, a pair of red boxing gloves and a naked sleeping body. On the wall hangs a cover of the Soviet anti-alcohol magazine Sobriety and Culture, with a portrait of Tolstoy. In At the Church, a wrecked car is depicted in front of the gold domes of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Made more than a quarter of a century ago, both works now look like a forecast.
Next to Kulik, Esther Ferrer’s Juguetes educativos (Educational Toys), sitting under Plexiglas boxes on a long white table: plastic pistols, a soldier lying with his rifle, a racing car marked “Battle Force”. The barrels and gun muzzles end in small phallic forms. On the side of the car, a label reads “La violación arma de guerra”: rape as a weapon of war.
Speaking about the exhibition in general, ORLAN describes the other four artists as friends she has admired for a long time. “I always enjoy taking part in group exhibitions, because the works enter into dialogue with the work of other artists. It opens up new readings, new perspectives and new angles of analysis,” she says. “All the more so because in this exhibition I find myself surrounded only by friends whose work I admire as much as the fine people they are, and have for a long time: Emeric Lhuisset, Esther Ferrer, Léa Le Bricomte and Oleg Kulik. These are deeply committed artists who, like me, question social phenomena and take a stand on the world around us. They are not artists who just contemplate their navels, making works to please themselves, works adapted to the market, pretty works that shock no one, works that are there to decorate apartments and make money. So I am very happy to have shared this space with them, both for the richness of our exchanges and for the sensibility and commitments our works may share.”
Parisians came to the opening to show their support.Guests came from French and international institutions, including Eugenio Viola, director of the MADRE museum in Naples, and Christopher Miles of the French Ministry of Culture, as well as representatives of the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre. The contemporary art scene was represented by the artist Fabrice Hyber and the critic and curator Dominique Moulon. Film director Gabriel Aghion and journalist Ariel Wizman were also among those attending.
“Their solidarity became an extension of the exhibition: a collective action in which the possibility of a different society is born,” says Sarah Vinitz. She has also added: “For me, culture is about working on relationships between people. Peace requires our participation: a willingness to listen, seek common ground, and maintain connection even where it seems impossible. Everyone who enters this dialogue becomes a co-author of change.”
