Show Less
Claire Fontaine
10 October - 6 December
Opening: 9 October 6-8:30PM
Curated by Daria Khan
Content guidance: this exhibition includes sexually explicit content and strong language.
Mimosa House is delighted to present our autumn show with Claire Fontaine. This will be the Palermo-based artist duo’s first significant solo show in a publicly-funded space in London.
Coinciding with Frieze London, Show Less is Claire Fontaine’s first institutional exhibition in the UK, bringing together new and existing works that offer a visual and theoretical exploration of feminism and human strike, drawing on the methods of interruption, repetition, contagion, and genealogy.
The exhibition title, Show Less, refers both to the policing of women’s clothing and to shrinking expressions of freedom and increasing self-censorship that have intensified globally in the cultural field over the last two years.
At the heart of the exhibition is a reflection on how visibility is produced and controlled, how words and images collide in the digital era, creating a specific form of political and historical disorientation. Newsfloor (The Guardian) 2025 transforms the gallery into a space where Claire Fontaine’s sculptures and lightboxes ‘float’ on top of the latest news, images, and advertisements. The content that emerges from the newspaper’s pages associates randomly with the artworks, raising questions about the current state of the world as mediated by the press.
Shown in Mimosa House’s window, Claire Fontaine’s new neon F A T H E R F U C K E R inverts the familiar insult ‘motherfucker’ to expose the gendered violence embedded in language. The reversal conjures the figure of the father both as abuser and as victim, reminding us that violence is never neutral, but overwhelmingly gendered. The word unsettles habitual speech, forcing us to ask who violates, and who is violated.
Claire Fontaine is a conceptual and feminist collective artist founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in Paris in 2004. Their practice aims to activate the forms and forces of visual culture by emphasising their political content. Working across video, sculpture, painting, and writing, Claire Fontaine explores themes of resistance, identity, and power.
The 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 took its title, Foreigners Everywhere, from Claire Fontaine’s iconic neon series; their work was included in both the main exhibition and the Holy See Pavilion. Recent solo exhibitions include: Kiran Nadar Museum of the Arts and Aga Khan Foundation, New Delhi, 2025; Museo Riso, Palermo, 2024 and Fondation Hermès, Seoul, 2024.
This project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025), with the aim of promoting Italian contemporary art internationally. In Partnership with The WoW Foundation Rome ETS. Show Less is also kindly supported by Italian Cultural Institue, London.
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