For her solo show at 40mcube, Laura Gozlan creates a sculptural environment in which is displayed a cycle of video micro-fictions staging an evocation of the Monstrous Feminine.

In her installation composed of videos and sculptures, Laura Gozlan questions the links between subculture and Posthumanism, their founding myths such as New Age and Cybernetics, and their dystopias.

She creates video fluxes by assembling in a non-hierarchical way both images she borrowed or shot herself, and merging them with a soundtrack that induces altered states of consciousness. She elaborates sculptural environments along the lines of Gene Youngblood’s Expended Cinema [1]. Through fragmentation, crumpling and reflection operations, she conducts research on the three-dimensionality of projected images.
She finds as much inspiration in the giallo, as she does in anticipation film, and in scientific documents. All three conceal archetypes and techno-utopian myths that inform us about their resonance with occultism and ideologies of these countercultures.
For her solo show at 40mcube, Laura Gozlan present a series of videos displayed in an environment made of sculptures. She interprets MUM, a character who originates in the « Monstrous Feminine «, and embodies different forms of it: archaic mother, vampire, witch. Barbara Creed [3] sees this archetype of horror cinema as a reflection of the patriarchal ideology that presents women as monstrous and abject in that their sexuality and «reproductive function» are opposed to the symbolic patriarchal law. The rites that the artist stages merge archetypes specific to witchcraft and programs of transhumanism.
MUM foils the masculine-feminine binarisms and borders on the abject when she gets high on mummy fumes with a female urinal, as a rejuvenation cure. The «biopolitics of the bathroom» [4] with its social construction of bodies and its assignment of genders is swept aside when MUM frees herself from the dictates of the cosmetics industry regarding the preservation of women’s youth. MUM returns in a new video cycle, inspired by didactic tutorials, in which she practices sexual magic. As diffuse as elusive in its origins, this practice consists in manipulating voluptuousness as an energy intended to make wishes come true.
Far from the voyeurism often associated with auto-eroticism, it is a question of moving it onto the field of grotesque horror, with humor allowing it to be both aggravated and distanced.
The sculptures presented in the exhibition are all objects that can be activated during MUM’s performances: stretched bodies, anatomical fragments, prostheses, etc. These artifacts create a hushed and minimal environment, halfway between the laboratory and the boudoir.
[1] In his book Expanded Cinema published in 1970, theorist of media arts Gene Youngblood is the first to consider video as an artistic practice.



[2] Giallo refers to a particular Italian film genre that mixes thriller, horror and eroticism.



[3] Barbara Creed, The Monstruous-Feminin – Film, feminism, psychoanalysis, 1993.



[4] Paul B. Preciado, « Biopolitique à l’ère du capitalisme pharmacopornographique », in
Chimères, 2010/3 (no74).