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Héla Fattoumi and Éric Lamoureux asked seven female dancers to perform their femininity, exploring the expressive potential of the body beyond the simple artifices attributed to females. Using an empty space above which hang seven luminous boxes channeling the famous “glass ceiling,” they equip the seven women with an array of hair extensions and body prostheses – shades of Cindy Sherman or the French artist ORLAN – and creating an alarmingly homogenous female landscape.

Choreographing the transformations and the splintering of this idealized fleshly construction, triggering and twisting the most alienating, pernicious effects of the female stereotype. From the harem women of the 19th century synthesized by the painter Jean-Dominique Ingres in his Turkish Bath to the Moorish women posing, nude, mute, for naughty colonial postcards, to the most contemporary representations of the sex doll, it is with a certain irony that they reveal this veritable assembly-line of clichés.

They reveal the disfiguration of an entire section of humanity by another, offering in response to this masquerade of the erotic fascination of the masculine gaze, a horde of seven rebels who impetuously take down the female and the male with impunity. Choosing to shake up both genre and gender, hoping to dissolve its diktats, so that they may play freely with all possible disparities – this is perhaps what Héla Fattoumi and Éric Lamoureux are showing us.