Annette Messager's Word-Based Works Examined in New Monograph

Les presses du Réel has published 'Annette Messager, Mot pour mot', a comprehensive volume edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac that collects the artist's writings, interviews, and text-based works spanning over three decades. The book documents how Messager uses words as triggers in her practice, subjecting them to operations like collecting, selecting, ordering, and commenting. Through albums, notebooks, maps, embroideries, and series, a female subject ('je') emerges, revisiting themes of daily temporality, seduction, authority, sexuality, and maternity, systematically displacing the moral framework that constrains them. The works oscillate between humor and biting irony, and a certain gravity that resides in implicit relationships between collection and solitude, reinforced by the repetition of pastimes that seem to precipitate death. Christophe Kihm notes that Messager's formula 'with art, it is always a question of trap' subtly suggests this double tension. The volume also reveals how Messager maintained a singular relationship with conceptual art throughout her career, conceived in a minor key like the rest of her practice.