Laura Gozlan's 'Youth Enhancement Systems®' at Galerie Valeria Cetraro

Laura Gozlan's exhibition 'Youth Enhancement Systems®' at Galerie Valeria Cetraro in Paris (September 3 to October 12, 2019) explores the human quest for immortality through cosmetics, cosmism, and 'zombie drugs.' The installation transforms the small gallery into a vaporous, labyrinthine space with yellow voile curtains and thick carpet, creating a dreamlike atmosphere. Body parts—feet, legs, hands—cast in wax, jesmonite, and plaster protrude from under curtains, evoking mummies and abjection as theorized by Julia Kristeva. Three video works (Y.E.S. I, MUM Pls; Y.E.S. II, I am a necromantic; Y.E.S. III, Ptomaïne) are screened on monitors at opposite ends of the gallery, formatted like commercials. They follow a pink-clad housewife (played by Gozlan) performing rituals: inhaling embalming vapors, exhuming and eating corpse parts, rehydrating a mummified skull. A monstrous voice-off comments, 'She’s aging, she knows she’s aging.' Gozlan references synthetic drugs like Krokodil and Flakka, and the Russian cosmist movement, particularly Nikolai Fyodorov's idea of resurrecting the dead for communism. Boris Groys's text 'The Immortal Bodies' is cited, arguing museums are sites of immortality where artworks are preserved vampirically. The exhibition blurs boundaries between living and non-living, real and fictional, using pop culture horror imagery and speculative realism.