A group exhibition of women artists organized by Monnaie de Paris in collaboration with the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.

Women House is the meeting of two notions: a gender - the female - and a space - the domestic one. Architecture and public space have been masculine while the domestic space was for a long time the prison or the shelter of women: this historical evidence is nevertheless not a fatality and the exhibition Women House shows this. On a 1000 Sq m. floor area and in some of Monnaie de Paris’ courtyards, it brings together 40 female artists of the 20^th and 21^st centuries who take up this complex subject and place women at the center of a history of which they were absent. After its Parisian stage, Women House will exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. on March 8, 2018.

The challenge of finding a work space at home was theorized by Virginia Woolf in 1929, as she encouraged women, in her essay "A Room of One's Own", to find a room that they could "lock up without disturbance”. This is the point of departure of Women House, whose ambition continues thematically, up to recent works produced by a young generation of women artists, passing by the 70s, when their counterparts equally rebelled against the deprivation of physical space -for exhibition or work-, as they did against the lack of the symbolic space - of recognition.

The exhibition's eight chapters display the complexity of the possible viewpoints on the subject: not only are they feminist (Desperate Housewives); they're also poetic (A Room of One's Own), political (Mobile Homes) or nostalgic (Doll's House). If, for some artists, the house may be a symbol of confinement and alienation, it becomes for others a source of inspiration, a place to reinvent oneself. As it were, women artists turn the house upside down: the symbol of enclosure becomes one representing the construction of identity. The intimate becomes political, the private space becomes a public one, the body is transformed into architecture. Depending on the cultural contexts and generations of artists, the house branches into a body-house, a nation-house, or even a world-house when the question of nomadism and forced exile arises--a recurrent one, going along violence and wars.

This project was born seven years ago, during the exhibition "elles@centrepompidou", upon discovering that two of the great contemporary women artists, Louise Bourgeois and Niki de Saint Phalle, had both dedicated an important part of their work to the "woman-house". This series of works became the starting point for a wider research which gradually became one of the chapters in the exhibition.

Other thematic recurrences common to women artists have gradually fed the seven other chapters: daily rituals of domestic life from the past and present, the confrontation of artists to questions of scale, the will to preserve the memory of buildings otherwise condemned to destruction or oblivion, and so on.

Women House's 40 artists come from four continents; they span from historic figures such as Claude Cahun to a young generation: Mexican artist Pia Camil, Iranian Nazgol Ansarinia, Portuguese Joana Vasconcelos, German Isa Melsheimer or the French Laure Tixier and Elsa Sahal ... Some of the names are already famous (Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint Phalle, Martha Rosler, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, Rachel Whiteread), others are the subject of recent rediscoveries connected to a rereading of the History of Art in terms of gender parity (Birgit Jürgenssen, Ana Vieira, Leticia Parente, Heidi Bucher).

Monumental works will be exhibited in Monnaie de Paris’ courtyards, rendered public and accessible free of charge from the Fall 2017.

An exhibition under the curatorship of Camille Morineau, Director of Exhibitions and Collections of Monnaie de Paris and Lucia Pesapane, Exhibition curator at Monnaie de Paris.