Anna Haifisch: Souris au bec

An artists’ residence, a museum, a psychiatric clinic and the mythical highways of Los Angeles: Anna Haifisch’s work displays a poetry of heterotopias that is graphic as well as literary. It is a poetry of places outside the day-to-day world and yet despairingly commonplace. With laconic humor, Haifisch practices a highly original drawing text synthesis associating different genres—comics, drawing, illustration and screen printing—as she questions the utopian potential of the imagination.

In 2008, Anna Haifisch began publishing a weekly column in the US-American magazine, Vice. For this, she created the artist’s protagonist, who would then become the main character in the trilogy The Artist. The psychological, social and economic conditions for artistic creation are also reflected in other works such as Clinique von Spatz (2015) and Mouse in Residence (2021).

The protagonists are typically mice or birds—countless and nameless creatures that inhabit urban spaces. Neither pets nor wild animals, they represent triviality to the core. For the artist, these are the most flexible beings. They have no real meaning but nibble at the thread of significance, unravel it, then reattach it. The slight distancing effect created by these fictional human replacements results in a tragic comedy without ever making a mockery of itself: it’s liberating when we experience a moment of truthfulness through laughter.

Souris au bec (Mouse in a beak) is the first solo exhibition of works by Anna Haifisch (born 1986 in Leipzig) in France. Along with existing works, new productions will also be showcased during this exhibition.

Curated by Anna Sailer.