A year after the exhibition At the Edge of the Worlds, the creator and ‘coiffurist’ Charlie Le Mindu (born in 1986, lives in Paris) is coming back to Palais de Tokyo with Charliewood, an unclassifiable creation staging his fantastical imaginary.

In 2015, true to its desire to “haunt the interval” between territories of artistic expression and to seek out creation beyond the art world, Palais de Tokyo invited Charlie Le Mindu to present several of his “capillary sculptures”, as the creator puts it, as part of the show At the Edges of the Worlds.

Today, the creator is coming back with Charliewood, a new revue seemingly set at the confines of fashion, performance art and installation. With it, Charlie Le Mindu has devised a multidisciplinary creation mingling music, dance, video and performance, based around the vertiginous possibilities of metamorphosing the human body. Shifting between elements inspired from the world of cabaret, the show spills out from the stage.

As an irreverent creator, Charlie Le Mindu has produced strange “capillary sculptures” with human proportions. His productions, mixing together toupees, costumes, makeup, body paint, sculptures and scenery, are inspired by subjects as varied as ancient mythology, fantastical bestiaries, medieval headdresses, or else the mysteries of the seabed. Instead of being mere decoration, hairstyles thus become recreations of the self, revealing glimpses of the possibilities for transforming or extending the human body.

“Based on his fetishist themes – the body, trans-sexuality, ambiguity – Charlie Le Mindu distils transgression into the codes and constraints of the stylistic exercise of the revue, the better to disobey them. Fragmented, hybrid bodies are deconstructed, becoming nothing but a mouth, nose, ear, or moustache, with hair turning into skin.” Vittoria Matarrese, co-curator

“With an explosive eclecticism, Charlie Le Mindu mixes up allusions to Dolly Parton and to feminism. The title, Charliewood, was chosen as a reference to Dollywood, the entertainment park created by the singer in Tennessee, while A Male Gaze, his previous show, derived from the concept theorised by the critic Laura Mulvey, which states that our visual culture participates in the dominant patriarchal system.” Julien Fronsacq, co-curator

(1) Sabrina Champemois, « Charlie Le Mindu monte sur ses grands cheveux » in Libération NEXT, 5 Decembre 2014.