Pietà de la Place du Marche
2005

installation
digital print on PVC
mounted on an aluminium frame
317 x 440 cm
exhibition Femme(s), Geneva

Pietà 2003 is imbued with a new life when it was presented in the exhibition Femme(s) in Carouge, Genèva, Switzerland at the occasion of the 10-year jubilee of the World Conference of Women in Beijing.

The photo shows a woman, seated with a white rag doll on her lap in the middle of a main traffic street in New York – which she is oblivious to – says in a symbolical way goodbye to a phase in her life: youth or innocence?
The work can be seen as a metaphor for the existential aspects of her life.

The specific location of the work, Place du Marche, is an active square in the centre of the city of Carouge. This location asked for a large format of the work in order to become an appropriate component of the market square.

The sculpture was installed on the long side of the square, close to the church, on the level of the first floor above a cafe. Because of the site, a traffic area and a church square, the meaning of the religious as opposed to the worldly is emphasized. A translation/adaptation of an icon from Catholic belief is placed on the street and thus revealed its meaning much more intensely. However, such a discussion was very modest due to the subtlety of the sculpture itself.

Literally speaking, the work calls to mind two different cities: Carouge and New York. Thus symbolically, a window is opened towards another part of the world. This emphasized the starting point of the exhibition: ‘the position of women in the world at large’.