Margaret Harrison: Dancing on the missiles / & Degrés Est: Florence Jung

Margaret Harrison. Dancing on the missiles
June 28–October 6, 2019

Margaret Harrison (Yorkshire, *1940) is an influential figure in the feminist art movement in the 1970s in the UK. Over the past 50 years, she has developed a body of thought focusing on the issues of class, gender and more generally the place of women in society. In Harrison’s first major exhibition in France, 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine highlights the diversity of her practice, which includes installations, paintings, drawings, collages, and writing. The work of this artist and activist challenges the visual canons and codes underlying the representation of women in society, as well as women’s self-perception.

Her drawings of the superheroes sporting stilettos and her portrait of Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, as Bunny Boy, led to the police shutting down her first exhibition in London in 1971. In parallel, Harrison has engaged in a reflection, spanning her whole career, on labor conditions of the working classes. Attentive to economic and social developments in rural UK and United States, from the rise of Manchester and Liverpool in the late-19th century to the industrial crisis of the 1970s, which affected England as well as California, Margaret Harrison has produced an extensive body of work based on sociological surveys. She also examines Western cultural icons, exposing their normative potential and the power relationships they both replicate and perpetuate. Long available only to limited audiences, her work is now beginning to enjoy wider recognition and renewed relevance, encouraging us to go beyond binary approaches to race or sex.

Degrés Est : Florence Jung
June 28–October 6, 2019

Florence Jung writes scenarios that infiltrate reality. Her scripted situations are built around a system of clues, absences, and rumors. Based on social sciences, as well as literature and philosophy, Jung’s work explores the paradoxes of the contemporary individual, his or her relationship to uncertainty, and the narrative potential of suspicion.

For her exhibition at 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine, she has researched statistical data and results of opinion polls conducted among the residents of the Grand Est in order to create the profile of a typical individual. Jung’s project consists in an attempt to locate such a person, whose existence, inferred from figures and estimates, seems doubtful.

Florence Jung was born in 1986 in Lorraine, and is currently a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam.

Program of events

Concert
Saturday, July 13
Night noise with Avale (cold wave, post punk) & Mor(†)sure (dark electro)

Shared Perspectives
Thursday, September 5 
Exhibition tour by Felizitas Diering, Marie Griffay, and Fanny Gonella, directors of the three FRAC of the Grand Est

Screening
Thursday, September 19 
Salt of the Earth, Dir. Herbert J. Biberman, 1954, 94 min, English with French subtitles

Lecture
Tuesday, September 24 
Clara Schumann and others: Daring to compose. Camille Villanove, musicologist and music mediator

Drawings & Drinks
Friday, September 27 
A lot of ink and a few drops of pastis: a pretext to sketch, drink, and shoot the breeze

Illustrated Debate
Wednesday, October 2
Superhero/ine with Romain Monsifrot, les Éditions de l’Éclisse, illustrated catalog division at Flammarion; Vincent Cadieu, faculty at the Institut Régional de Travail Social; Zoe Thouron & Charlie Zanello, illustrators

Screening & Discussion
Thursday, October 3 
Ouvrir la voix Film by Amandine Gay, 2017, 122 min

Workshop
Saturday, September 5 & Sunday, September 6
​Spiritual activism and alternative forms of knowledge