Annette Messager – Crise de Foi / Crisis of Faith Poster Annette Messager x Kunsthalle Praha

Product detailed description

This A3 poster presents the work Crise de foi (2016) by Annette Messager. The title translates as Crisis of Faith, but in French it sounds identical to crise de foie – a liver or gallbladder attack. A single letter turns doubt about belief into physical nausea: religious dogma becomes something that makes the female body and society sick, and that must be expelled from the system.

The inscription belongs to a series of provocative slogans that Messager took from the rhetoric of the activist group Femen and incorporated into the project À mon seul désir (2016–2017). It stands alongside lines such as No God in my vagina, Je suis mon propre prophète and In Gay we Trust. Political activism moves from the street into the space of art, becoming a joyful, defiant manifesto on self-determination, bodily autonomy and freedom from religious control.

The work is part of the exhibition Annette Messager: Tragikomedie at Kunsthalle Praha, which traces the French artist's practice across five decades. Irony, humour and defiance, where laughter meets anger, are hallmarks of Messager's work. The poster carries this approach into the interior as a confident, slightly provocative element that recalls the exhibition long after it has closed.

Annette Messager

Annette Messager is a French artist whose practice brings together installation, drawing, collage, photography and object-making. She represented France at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, and her work has been shown at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, MoMA in New York and the Hayward Gallery in London.

Throughout her career she has explored the body, gender, desire and memory. Her early works examine systems of control and stereotypes associated with women; from the 1980s she developed new ways of depicting the female figure – witches, monsters, heroines and protesters – often with humour and gentle subversion.

Her work is defined by tension between opposites – care and violence, order and chaos, playfulness and unease. In doing so, it invites us to look anew at what we take for granted.