Focus on... "Your Privacy Is Very Important to Us", by Genesis Belanger

There is no longer anybody who does not know the cardinal rule behind free digital content: if there’s nothing to pay, then you are the product. A harsh reality that justifies the sycophantic and rather dubious tone with which the multinational tech ogres mining our data glibly assure us of their concern: “Your privacy is very important to us.” And how.

American artist Genesis Belanger, who studied at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in Providence, the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and then Hunter College, in New York City, where she now lives, uses this ubiquitous wording as the title of one of her greatest works. A sculpture set against the wall, thereby resembling a kind of high relief, Your Privacy Is Very Important to Us features four pairs of shoe-clad feet peeking out from behind a large curtain whose wave pleats recall Luciano Fabro’s exceptional Attaccapanni, created in the 1970s. Belanger’s composition suggests four spectators about whom nothing else is revealed—especially not the gaze, blocked by the polling-booth-like structure in which they seem to be condemned. Anonymity, concealment, possibly shame: all are potential interpretations of this confrontation, which by not looking us in the face intensifies our speculation.

This piece is ideal for a museum collection, where the subjects viewing always vie, to varying degrees, with the work on view, in a game of superimpositions, substitutions, and diffractions with no outcome or guaranteed solution. What is the destiny of bodies inside a museum, bodies that are very much alive, occupying it for a moment, fanning out and moving around with the aim of taking account of the objects proposed, whether they like them or not, which are also bodies in their own way, and frequently bodies represented, imagined or forgotten? They are a collection of viewers endlessly recomposed, observing and judging each other, sometimes recognizing themselves. Every museum has an element of a human zoo about it, Genesis Belanger suggests. As seen throughout her work, which demonstrates a love of crafted finish with occasional Californian accents, along with a concerted combination of sugar-sweet and poisonous (never forget to add a drop of curare to the grenadine), this work also contains various echoes of Surrealism and certain more recent artists (Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Jim Shaw, and even David Lynch). Presented at the exhibition "Blow Out" at Perrotin Paris in 2023, Your Privacy Is Very Important to Us is an indisputable success that disrupts the “viewer’s place” and disturbs us, in every sense of the word. ◼