Fragments at the Fondation des États-Unis, Paris, France
April 5 - April 23, 2023

 

Fragments presents an ongoing search marked by simultaneous encounter and isolation, as Muza charts a sequence of nodes between 1920s queer Paris and now. Compelled by inclination and desire, they map their own experience onto the historical through the recuperation and representation of archival material. If the archive qua history intends to locate, place, and position, then Muza acknowledges this fragmented perspective as an inherent abstraction. Weaving offers a structural framework for cohering what seem to be apparent dislocations—in fact, time and space compound as a subtle yet consistent mechanism in the unfolding of their work. Muza pulls freely from their own archive in the same gesture as they draw from the historical milieu, particularly from the artist and writer Claude Cahun. In so doing, they reify and relay that lineage in their own work and to the present moment. In collating these fragments, the limits and extensions of identification are rendered as images held in tension to parts of a whole.

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“Nothing is sacrosanct,”

the Vitrine descends,

time unspools (a spool of golden thread)

threads the eye (an inverting lens)

a needlepoint aperture

hand into matter

concatenations

wound into capture

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text and poem by Ren Mahon