Offrandes

Offrandes takes the ex-voto as its point of departure to consider the parallel between placing an offering in a place of worship and exhibiting, within a white cube, an artwork that seeks to act upon the world. Both gestures assume that an object, placed in a symbolically charged space and addressed to a community, can produce effects beyond itself. The exhibition examines certain historical characteristics of the ex-voto, including its accumulative, Marian, anatomical, and narrative forms, in order to trace their persistence in contemporary practices. Above all, it proposes the ex-voto as a prism through which a gesture and a capacity to act become attached to a form. Most of the artists gathered here do not, strictly speaking, produce ex-votos. Their works nevertheless perform a comparable symbolic function by seeking to celebrate, repair, heal, or recount. The exhibition thus considers what the ritual dimension might contribute to an understanding of art’s political agency.

 

The exhibition opens with works that draw directly on the forms of the ex-voto, revealing both their persistence in contemporary practices and their connection to popular culture. Historically produced outside academic circuits, often anonymously, and intended to be seen by all, the ex-voto offered a collective form of access to painting and sculpture.

 

The second section approaches the question of address through the Marian figure. An object of sometimes fervent devotion, the Virgin crystallises contradictory imaginaries in which virginity, motherhood, pain, and sexuality coexist in a state of permanent tension. The artists rework these attributes to propose other representations of the female body, freed from the ideal of purity while retaining the protective power of the votive figure.

 

The third section draws on the tradition of anatomical ex-votos to explore the question of “being-in-common”, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms. While the ex-voto traditionally isolates an organ in order to request its healing, the artists presented here consider the intangible communities we form with one another and with our environments.

 

The final section addresses the narrative dimension of the ex-voto and explores how its testimonial function can become a means of examining displacement and colonial memory.