Exhibition Review by Georgia Gerson
24 May - 20 September 2026
Curated by François Quintin and Stephane Ibars. Supported by Korea Arts Management Service and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (South Korea).
In the middle of a burning hot July day, as the streets thronged for the eightieth Festival d’Avignon and its fringe counterpart, Festival Off Avignon, I happily stumbled upon the sprawling contemporary art foundation Collection Lambert (fig. 1 and 2). Housed in two connected eighteenth-century grand mansions, its airy halls revealed an exceptionally well-endowed collection of modern and contemporary art, donated to the French state by the gallerist and art collector Yvon Lambert.
For the summer of 2026, the right wing of the building was dedicated entirely to temporary exhibitions celebrating the work of women artists. Alongside Le murmure des Libres, a room was devoted to the delicate sculptures of young local artist Melika Sadeghzadeh (fig. 3), while the basement was handed over to American artist Kim Gordon’s frenetic and intense installation Stories for a Body (fig. 4). Although presented under a unified title, Le murmure des Libres was formulated as three multidisciplinary solo monographs of work by non-Western women artists, namely Shilpa Gupta, Geumhyung Jeong and Jumana Manna, representing India, South Korea and Palestine respectively.
One first encounters the substantial installations of visual artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna. In the Cache series (2018–2023), abstract anthropomorphic clay and ceramic sculptures are set around the room. Their forms are drawn from khabyas, a once-common but now largely obsolete feature of rural Levantine architecture used to store grain. In varying sizes and colours, these forms are set against steel grates, creating a contrast between their soft, organic curves and their urban, industrial display structures, thereby representing two differing modes of storage. In this way, the series draws attention to some of the artist’s key concerns: ruination, the violence of industrial agriculture, relationships to land and the paradoxes of preservation and archiving.
The steel grates continue in the third room devoted to the artist, this time as a platform upon which is presented Old Bread International (2022), a work which I found touchingly intricate and melancholic. Consisting of ceramic sculptures of pieces of bread at various stages of decomposition, their likeness to that which they replicate is uncanny. They are displayed alongside everyday materials such as plastic grocery bags, newspapers and concrete cinder blocks. As with the Cache series, the installation mimics a common sight across the Mediterranean and again plays with the ancient and the modern, evoking the practice of leaving votive offerings for fertility goddesses while simultaneously resembling the mundane detritus of stale bread and litter left behind on city streets. Bringing these objects into the space of the museum calls attention to what is preserved and what is left behind or unrepresented. Equally, by remaking stale bread in ceramic and bringing it into the museum, Manna reinvests the everyday object with value and significance, recalling its earlier status as a votive offering while contrasting this with its status as waste.
Leaving Manna’s section of the exhibition, one moves into a corridor which, rather than remaining a blank transitory space, is activated by the work of Shilpa Gupta. Presented in a row are several framed pencil-on-paper works which form part of the artist’s Nothing Will Go on Record series (2016/2023). Small and delicately sketched, each image depicts a moment of police brutality during public protests, but the images of the protestors themselves have been erased, leaving only the outlines of the bodies of the authorities. Again, the contrast between the delicately sketched figures and the violence the images depict is striking. By removing the bodies of the protestors, Gupta paradoxically makes them visible, deftly drawing attention to systems of erasure and censorship that uphold bureaucratic structures of power.
At the end of the corridor, behind a thick curtain, Gupta’s immersive sound installation Listening Air (2019–2025) continues the exploration of histories of protest, this time through the power of language (fig. 5). In a dark room, microphones attached to dim lightbulbs circulate eerily from the ceiling, each emitting a different song of protest. I found myself transfixed and deeply moved as voices carrying songs of solidarity from oppressed communities across different historical moments traversed time and space to reach me through Gupta’s curation: from farmers’ protests in India, to folk songs from the Civil Rights Movement, to student sit-downs in Spain.
In contrast to the darkness of Listening Air, the spacious, naturally lit room at the top of the building is devoted to South Korean choreographer and artist Geumhyung Jeong’s Under Construction (ongoing) (fig. 6 and 7). Littered across the floor are complex animatronic sculptures, constructed from mechanical parts, hardware, motors and synthetic components of human skeletons. These constructions, part robot and part human, eerily recognisable yet unfamiliar, appear unfinished, at first seeming abandoned on the floor. However, the artist is present in the room, working over machine parts at a workstation and tenderly making adjustments to her constructions as she attempts to care for and communicate with them through a dialogue of gestures and choreographed movements. It feels akin to walking into Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, wherein the outcomes of these dialogues and communications are similarly awkward and unpredictable. As with Mary Shelley’s monster, one is left feeling at once uncomfortable and empathetic towards these skeletal machines, as Jeong forces us to confront the increasingly intimate and entwined relationship between human bodies and technology.
While the three monographs that make up Le murmure des Libres encompass a wide variety of media and techniques, narratives of protest, belonging, humanity and site specificity form common threads, deftly woven together through the curatorial choice to stage them alongside one another. The exhibition title loosely translates as The Murmur of the Free, and in each new room I found myself moved by installations afforded the space—thanks to the scale of Collection Lambert’s footprint—to exist on their own terms and tell their own stories of freedom: Manna through interrogations of land, resources and what is preserved or lost; Gupta through resistance to political suppression and the erasure of histories; and Jeong through the increasingly blurred boundaries between bodily autonomy and technology.
Georgia Gerson recently submitted her PhD in History of Art at the University of York, which examined the construction of value in the contemporary art market through the lens of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). She is a Teaching Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art on the MA in Art and Business programme, and was awarded the University of York Humanities Research Centre Doctoral Fellowship in 2024. Her writing has appeared in Routledge publications, Grove Art Online and peer-reviewed journals, and she previously served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Aspectus: A Journal of Visual Culture.
