At MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, a major monographic exhibition of Kiki Smith marking her 40 years of artistic career

This summer, MO.CO. is opening its spaces to the great American artist Kiki Smith. After hosting other major female figures of contemporary art such as Berlinde De Bruyckere, Huma Bhabha, and Françoise Pétrovitch, we will celebrate a body of work spanning diverse practices, centered on the question of being in the world — the social, spiritual, animal, and celestial body.

Kiki Smith, an American artist born in Germany in 1954, has developed a multidisciplinary practice since the 1980s, blending sculpture, engraving, photography, drawing, books, tapestries, and various objects. One of the hallmarks of her work is experimentation through diversity and the refusal of any form of hierarchy. A central subject remains the human body, often female, its anatomy, its imprint, its relationship to the living. Sometimes unsettling, altered, or fragmented, it also appears calm, unifying, and a meeting point of energies.

Alongside the exhibition dedicated to Kiki Smith, MO.CO. Panacée presents a group exhibition, "À fleur de peau," on monstrosity

This summer, MO.CO. Panacée is organizing a group exhibition exploring monstrosity, and monstrous and mutant forms in contemporary art. As Antonio Gramsci once said, we live in an age of monsters. Gramsci may have been reflecting on the interregnum, a legal and political in-between moment when legality is suspended, and which, in his case, preceded the rise of fascism in the 20th century. Our present does not seem to be immune to what can only be described as monstrous, without being able to define it more precisely. According to teratologist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the monster represents everything a society tries to reject. It is an error, a difference, a deviation, an excess.

While these qualifiers were initially limited to monstrosity as a biological developmental anomaly, from a scientific and medical perspective, they now extend to the notion of the social monster: a being, an idea, reflecting the current state of a society and its collective imagination. Through nearly eighty works by about twenty artists, dating from the 1970s to today, the exhibition À fleur de peau does not claim to diagnose monstrosity, but rather delves into Pandora's box to reveal that the monstrous is often not as distant as one might imagine. It exists on both sides of the skin.