The exhibition Sirene explores photography in the expanded field, where materiality and three-dimensionality are used to challenge and extend the medium. The works appear as reliefs, with frames made from bonded foam, upholstery, and latex, which function as integral parts of the expression. Ornamented with insects and freshwater pearls, they highlight the tension between vanity and decay, ornament and transience.

A central sculpture, covered in raw upholstery and latex, resembles a peeled surface that reveals inner layers of under-skin, decomposition, and hidden structures. Like a shell opening, it suggests the unveiling of either precious pearls or mere sand.

Another photographic work references the face mask used in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, modeled on the death mask of a young woman who drowned in the Seine in the 1880s – later mythologized as “the most kissed girl in the world” or “the Mona Lisa of the Seine.”

Drawing on the myth of the siren, the exhibition reflects on the ephemerality of beauty and the female body as object. It points to the ways in which art history has idealized youth and beauty through the masculine gaze, while neglecting or demonizing aging and transformation.

Sirene situates itself in the tension between ornament and transformation, between external perception and internal experience, and between beauty, the body, and its inevitable fragility.