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Annette Messager Petite Babylone, 2019
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Petite Babylone, 2019, a floor installation made up of hundreds of abstract shapes and bodily forms in black wrap intermingled with stuffed animals, with shadows and light shifting along the wall. Messager’s calcinated Babylon is an apocalyptic realm, a landscape in the aftermath of a seemingly devastating event. In this ‘fin du monde’ scenario, living forms are destroyed, petrified, carbonized, and attacked by invading animals – a duck, a squirrel, a rabbit, a pigeon, a kitten, a raccoon, a lizard, a chicken, a bird. Hands, fingers emerge from certain structures, forming shadows that spin and shift on the wall.
At the edge of civilization, devoid of human presence, fossilized structures and spectral shadows reign. Messager conjures a zone suggesting both real events, such as the tsunami in Fukushima, Japan, 2011, and reminiscent of the topography of darkness explored in recent works. Whether a phantasm, a subterranean world, or a universal state of mind, these menacing and satiric forms have been present in installations such as Continents Noir, 2010, or La Chambre des légendes, 2019, recently shown at the Institut Giacometti, Paris.