Penser le présent with Miriam Cahn in conversation with Emma Lavigne and Marta Dziewańska

Let's talk about housework!

The artist Miriam Cahn, who is currently presenting the exhibition STILL LEBEN at the Jocelyn Wolff Gallery, is in conversation with the curator and art historian Marta Dziewańska and the curator Emma Lavigne. Together, they reflect on the themes of the exhibition and how this new series of works extends the artist’s feminist commitments and struggles: how the focus on everyday objects and gestures is political.

As Yann Châteigné Tytelman writes in the exhibition text: ‘With STILL LEBEN, Miriam Cahn embarks on a new body of work. In these recent works, almost all produced in the last few months, there are no bodies, or almost none. Only objects, everyday situations, interiors. No more brutality, at least on the surface. But a focus on the domestic world and what the artist calls ‘housework’.”

Influenced by performance art and the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Miriam Cahn developed a body of work in the 1980s featuring large, powerful black drawings depicting warships, televisions, fighter jets and other elements drawn from a traditionally masculine imagination. She uses her own body to bring the drawing to life through a performative gesture. The body is not merely a subject of contemplation: it also serves as a medium for the artist. From 1994 onwards, Cahn introduced colour into her work, drawn to the formal and psychological power of images derived from the mass media. Over the past few decades, the breadth and iconographic richness of her work have addressed recurring themes such as the body, human conflicts, habitat, war, nature and landscape, whether real or imagined.
Miriam Cahn (born in Basel in 1949) lives and works in Stampa, Switzerland.
Major solo exhibitions: MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon (2025), Stedelijk Museum (2024), Palais de Tokyo (2023); ICA Milan (2022); Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2022), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2020) & The Power Plant, Toronto (2021); Palazzo Castelmur (2021); Sifang Art Museum (2020); Kunstmuseum Bern (2019), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019) & Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2019); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2019). She took part in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017). She has received prestigious awards including the 14th Rubens Prize from the City of Siegen (2022), the Oberrheinischer Kunstpreis Offenburg, the Basler Kunstpreis, the Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis Berlin, …

Marta Dziewańska is a curator at KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels. From 2019 to 2023, she was a curator at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and, from 2007 to 2018, a curator and head of research at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
She has organised and co-organised several exhibition projects: ‘Anecdotes of Destiny’ (Kunstmuseum Bern; 2023), ‘miriam cahn: MA PENSÉE SERIELLE’ (Palais de Tokyo, 2023), ‘Feliza Bursztyn: Welding Madness’ (Muzeum Susch; 2021), ‘Things Fall Apart. Swiss Art from Boecklin to Valloton’ (Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020), ‘MIRIAM CAHN: I AS HUMAN’ (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2019), ‘Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes’ (The Hepworth Wakefield, 2017), and others. She is currently overseeing the preparation of: “A Truly Immense Journey. Selected works from the Centre Pompidou Collection” – an inaugural exhibition at the KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels.
Editor and co-editor of numerous art publications and catalogues.

Since November 2021, Emma Lavigne has been Director General of the Pinault Collection and Chief Curator of the collection. An art historian, Emma Lavigne holds degrees in history, art history and architecture from the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre. She served as a curator at the Cité de la Musique, then at the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Pompidou, before being appointed Director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2014 and subsequently becoming President of the Palais de Tokyo in September 2019. She has organised around a hundred exhibitions and curated more than fifty projects, both in France and abroad, including solo exhibitions dedicated to Pierre Huyghe and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at the Centre Pompidou, Christian Marclay at the Cité de la Musique, Warhol at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Kimsooja at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Anne Imhof and Miriam Cahn at the Palais de Tokyo, and thematic exhibitions such as ‘Danser sa vie’ at the Centre Pompidou, ‘Jardin Infini. De Giverny à l’Amazonie’, and ‘Couples modernes’ in Metz.
She curated the exhibition by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and subsequently curated “Mondes flottants” at the Lyon Biennale in 2017. As head of the collection and exhibition programming at the Pinault Collection, she has also curated exhibitions in Paris and Venice, including “Une seconde d’éternité”, “Avant l’orage”, “Icônes”, “Anri Sala” and “Tacita Dean”, “Clair Obscur”, and “Lorna Simpson”.