Antony Gormley, Sylvie Fleury and Stephan Balkenhol exhibited at the Fondation Villa Datris, Paris The group show 'FAIRE CORPS' explores contemporary perceptions of the body in art

'The body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle continuously alive, animating and nourishing it from within.' Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

FAIRE CORPS explores visions of the 'body' through the works of 60 established and emerging artists, both French and international, including Antony Gormley, Sylvie Fleury and Stephan Balkenhol. In the Foundation’s human-scale spaces and in its gardens, visitors will explore various facets of this classic but relevant subject.

How do we see the body today? The body is shaped by its structure and inner life as much as by the way we look at it.

Since the 19th century, and in keeping with profound mutations in society, representations of the 'classical' body and the 'ideal' nude have been increasingly called into question. In this exhibition, the body is explored as an object of concern for racialised, feminist, and gendered representations.

FAIRE CORPS also critiques the transcendent physical body, a site central to capitalism, along with the body’s role in social injustice, immigration, bioethics, cybernetics, wars, and contagions, as well as the body as a militating ecological force.

These subjects, while tangible, become an ode to beauty and life in the hands of the artists. The body - its prostheses, costumes and second skins - enter into action, blurring traditional boundaries between sculpture and performance art. Some works are activated, others linked to film or video.

FAIRE CORPS focuses, above all, on the body as restorative, joyful and comforting, while also addressing its aesthetic and conceptual shifts in contemporary art. In this way, classical sculpture is deployed for political ends. Notions of prosthesis become an excuse for phantasmagorical excess, or reveal a hybrid, cybernetic future. Costumes become second skins or select corporeal identities.

Finally, the body’s absence, whether dematerialised or invisible, is just as powerful as its representation.