Claire Fontaine

After lifting her name from a popular brand of French school notebooks and stationery, Claire Fontaine declared herself a readymade artist[2][3] and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work.

This aesthetic approach that she describes as "expropriation", a way of giving an existential use value to pre-existing objects and artworks, also addresses the general crisis of singularity, which she describes as the individual and collective impossibility to give a meaning to one's life under the current political circumstance and the systematic surveillance, repression and countless limitations of our freedom.

[5] In an Interview with Circa Art Magazine in 2008 she states: "I think forming gangs, mafias, collectives, networks, bands of people is a way to survive in the hostile capitalist system and then eventually a way to become a pressure group, in order to transform these particular conditions.

In February 2020 she was invited by Maria Grazia Chiuri to create the mise-en-scène for Dior's Autumn/Winter 2020 collection for Paris Fashion Week which took place in the Les Tuileries.

The artist used the catwalk to perform an operation of Institutional Critique investing the floor and the ceiling; she presented Newsfloor (Le Monde Pixelisé) (2020) and several large suspended LED signs stating for example: Patriarchy Kills Love, When women strike the world stops, Feminine beauty is a ready-made or Patriarchy = Climate emergency.

Untitled (on vous intoxique!), 2018
Claire Fontaine, Untitled (on vous intoxique!) (2018)
Claire Fontaine, Installation view from top to bottom: (PFW, Dior Autumn/Winter 2020) When women strike the world stops, 2020 / Newsfloor (Le Monde Pixelisé), 2020
When women strike the world stops (2020)/ Newsfloor (Le Monde Pixelisé) (2020)
Claire Fontaine, In God They Trust (2005)
Claire Fontaine, In God They Trust (2005). Twenty-five-cent coin, steel box-cutter blade, solder and rivet.
Claire Fontaine, Untitled (Negative) (2016)
Notes on the state of exception Our emotional environment is poor and dangerous. Artistic work can't change it, but it can transcribe it. It can also give an opinion, which we are never asked for. When armed men kill whatever person in the middle of the crowd because he looks guilty, this reminds us a past that doesn't pass and a future that we would like not to know. Victims are already so numerous nowadays that it would be a mistake to be moved by another one. It would be pathetic to ask for justice : the only justice for a victim is the revenge and revenge feeds the war. Power's violence is not a catastrophe anymore, it is a symptom of something crucial : the end of the democratic lie that used to structure even our more rebellious dreams. The war that includes us has as a main characteristic the fact of looking like a series of casualties. It transforms us all into guilty victims. It makes us into foreigners in our own countries. The state of exception that we live in has become the rule, and the only way to survive it is to abandon our fear and despise the power's terror, through all the means we have left. Remembering everything, resisting through our memory, telling the stories that the domination silences, refusing to become victims of our own idea of security, this could be a beginning. CF 08/2005 Notes sur
Requiem for Jean-Charles de Menezes (2005)
Requiem for Jean Charles de Menezes : Notes on the state of Exception/ Notes sur l'état d'exception, 2005. Text pile/window announcement with statement: A5 double-sided photocopies, no copyright.
Requiem for Jean Charles de Menezes [ 53 ] :  Notes on the state of Exception (2005). Text pile or window announcement, A5 double-sided photocopy, no copyright.