Dirty Rains

Curator: Alice Motard

Dirty Rains brings together the work of Marianne Marić (b. 1982) and Endre Tót (b. 1937) in a double exhibition that looks at how their respective works appropriate the public space through body and language.

During her research as laureate of CEAAC’s exchange programme with Budapest Gallery in 2022, photographer Marianne Marić focused on the city’s thermal baths, renowned for their beneficial and medicinal properties. More than a decade after shooting the first images of her famous series of femmes fontaines (‘fountain women’, an expression referring to female ejaculation), in which she pictured friends misappropriating fountains in the urban spaces of Mulhouse, Marić used her residency in Hungary to continue her investigations into fluids, from steam and sweat to rural customs of ‘watering’ young girls.

Following her stay in Budapest, CEAAC has invited Marić to present the results of her creative research alongside works by Endre Tót, an emblematic figure of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. Tót is known since the 1970s for his use of typographic characters, such as the slash or the zero, in photographic, postal and performative works that stand in the tradition of Conceptual Art and Mail Art.

The question of public space and its appropriation through body and language runs through the practice of both artists, despite their difference in age and creative background. Similarities can thus be found in their motifs (statuary and the relationship between body and architecture), tools (photographic recordings, the production of image-objects) and processes (ephemeral and spontaneous actions, street performances).

This double exhibition, whose display borrows a number of visual cues from Tót’s oeuvre, brings together two bodies of work that infiltrate the everyday, the better to emancipate themselves from it.

In collaboration with: Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, Centre national des arts plastique, Diamantino Labo Photo and MOUVEMENT. 

Furniture display: Alice Rochette, based on an original idea by Alice Motard after Endre Tót and with his kind agreement.