To mark the publication of Et pourtant…, published by the Beaux-Arts de Paris as part of the Écrits d’artistes collection, Annette Messager speaks with Marie-Laure Bernadac, a long-standing collaborator who has written the book’s foreword. The event will be followed by a book signing. 

Drawing on this overview of Annette Messager’s work—which brings together poems, unpublished studio notes and private diaries—and in response to Annette Messager’s solo exhibition currently on view at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature—*Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps*—they revisit a seminal work, Les pensionnaires (1971–1972), the accompanying collection album, and the presence of the written word in Annette Messager’s work. 

As Marie-Laure Bernadac notes: “This multifaceted installation from 1971–1972 is a seminal work because it brings together all her artistic practices: notebooks, stuffed animals, drawings, documentary panels, writing and the alphabet, and immediately highlights the dual nature of her approach, divided between artist and collector (…) This statement on the division of the flat and on dual identity is a manifesto of the situation of the female artist for Annette Messager”. 

Annette Messager was born in Berk-sur-Mer in 1943. She lives and works in Malakoff. Since the 1970s, her work has stood out, oscillating between the personal and the fictional, the social and the universal. Using everyday materials and drawing on principles of assemblage, collection and theatrical staging, she has explored a wide variety of media: constructions, documents, language, objects, taxidermy, drawings, photographs, fabrics, embroidery, image series, albums, sculptures and installations.  

Messager has engaged with fairy tales, mythology and doppelgänger figures throughout her work. Often drawing on memory and recollection as sources of inspiration, her multifaceted practice shares affinities with traditions as diverse as Romanticism, the grotesque, the absurd and the phantasmagorical.
Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2016, she has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou (2007), the Hayward Gallery in London (2009), the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2008), the MCA in Sydney (2014), K21 in Düsseldorf (2014), and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2022). Her exhibition Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps is currently on display at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature.

Marie-Laure Bernadac is an honorary chief curator of heritage. She has worked at the Musée Picasso (chief curator), the Centre Pompidou (head of the graphic arts department), the CAPC – Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art (deputy director) and the Louvre Museum (contemporary art curator).
She has curated numerous exhibitions, including: Feminine – Masculine, the Sex of Art (with Bernard Marcadé, Centre Pompidou, 1995); Louise Bourgeois (CAPC, 1998 and Centre Pompidou, 2008); Presumed Innocent (with Stéphanie Moisdon, CAPC, 2000); Picasso and the Masters (with Anne Baldassari, Grand Palais, 2008); Leiris & Co (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2015); Cindy Sherman (Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2020); William Kentridge (LaM, 2020); In the Air, Flying Machines (Hangar Y, 2023). Lacan, the Exhibition. When Art Meets Psychoanalysis (with Bernard Marcadé), 2024 at the Centre Pompidou-Metz
She has invited artists such as Tunga, Mike Kelley, Jan Fabre, Joseph Kosuth, Wim Delvoye, Elisabeth Ballet, Marie Ange Guilleminot, Michal Rovner, Nan Goldin and Michelangelo Pistoletto to the Louvre Museum...
She has published several books, including Annette Messager, mot pour mot (Les Presses du Réel, 2006) and the biography Louise Bourgeois (Flammarion, 2019).
 

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