At the origin of Ne Pas Toucher, there is an observation. The attacks, censorship and acts of vandalism targeting works by women and non-binary artists, cis or trans, are not isolated incidents but reactions. 

Rather than documenting these violences directly, the exhibition operates a reversal. It transforms the space into an active dispositif, an experiential terrain where some works respond, others resist, and where the male gaze ceases to remain sovereign.

The title Ne Pas Toucher initially evokes a familiar injunction: the one found in museums, organising the distance between artworks and bodies within exhibition spaces. But it also points toward another form of prohibition, more diffused and deeply embedded within bodies themselves: who may be looked at, approached and desired – and under what conditions.

The exhibition unfolds through a series of situations. Gestures are triggered, bodies exposed or withheld, images obstructed, surfaces protected. Some works operate as traps for the gaze itself. They anticipate intrusion, absorb it, or make it visible.

The body remains central throughout the exhibition. Bodies traversed by invisible inheritances of care, female labour and transmission, as in the installation of Olga Szynkarczuk.

Motherlamp is a feminist installation combining acrylic paintings on recycled vellum paper, ribbons and light. The work takes the form of three suspended glowing lamps connected through cascading rainbow ribbons, forming a network of care, connection and embodied knowledge.

Inspired by Emma Holten’s Deficit. The Hidden Value of Care, the project responds to the historical devaluation of care, the body and relational forms of knowledge since the Enlightenment. By invoking the legacy of witch trials and texts such as the Malleus Melficarium, the installation reclaims what was once feared or suppressed: women’s connection to nature, intuition and collective forms of knowledge passed through generations.

Echoing Audrey Large’s Moons of the Year, Motherlamp restores visibility to sensitive and embodied systems of knowledge that have long been marginalised or erased.

The installation celebrates care as a form of power.

It reclaims the body as a source of light.