Marilou Poncin

Episode 2Marilou Poncin
Series

Collective Selves

Identity unfolds as a shared terrain, shaped by intertwined memories, layered histories, and the environmental concerns that bind communities together. In online gatherings, artists weave these traces into shifting constellations that blur the boundary between self and collective. Through such communal making, identity becomes fluid—co-created, responsive to our changing world, and continually reshaped by the many who remember and care in common.

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Marilou Poncin

Marilou Poncin’s work unfolds within the shared imaginaries of the digital sphere, where desire, representation, and identity are continuously negotiated. Her practice navigates figures that populate online culture—camgirls, avatars, love dolls, influencers—revealing how the female body becomes a collective site of projection, circulation, and control.

Drawing inspiration from both art history and internet culture, Poncin revisits inherited visual codes to question how they continue to shape desire and power. By reactivating references from the Renaissance to mythological narratives, she exposes the long lineage of erotic representation and its lasting influence on today’s digital communities. These images, historically shaped by a male gaze, are reworked through a contemporary lens that unsettles their authority and opens them to reinterpretation.

Through the accumulation, enlargement, and materialization of images, Poncin reduces the distance between subject and viewer, transforming screens into tactile encounters. Her works operate as shared spaces where intimacy becomes collective, and where individual fantasies reveal themselves as part of a broader cultural construction—resonating with Collective Selves: Identity Through Community.

Episode

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Perfection is a lie to play with, Museum of Contemporary Art Lyon, France

Sleepy in a shell n°4
swimming in an oyster
she is born in a shell
Featured Artist

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Marilou Poncin
Artist
Marilou Poncin
B.1992, French

Marilou Poncin lives and works in Paris. As a visual artist, she studied at the Beaux Arts de Lyon, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and ENSAD Paris. Her work explores our fantasies in their encounter with new technologies. Her projects feature camgirls, avatars, love dolls, and influencers: these predominantly female figures populate the digital imagination. Each of the phantasmagorical worlds she explores reveals our individual and collective relationships with the societies in which we live, encompassing tastes, desires, lacks, and prejudices. Manipulating video installations, photography, painting, and ceramics, her works intersect multiple formats and mediums. Through the enlargement and accumulation of images, the artist reduces the distance between her subjects and the viewers, thereby offering them a tactile experience of the images and bodies. Launched in 2015 with the award from the Inrocks Lab (new video creation), her work was subsequently exhibited at Espace Témoin (Geneva), Frac Île-de-France, La Villette, Les Magasins Généraux, La Gaîté Lyrique, the Ricoh Art Gallery in Tokyo, and at festivals such as the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival and Videoformes in Clermont-Ferrand. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the SAM Prize for Contemporary Art and received funding from the Fondation des Artistes for her video installation project «Liquid love is full of ghosts.» She also designed a multimedia installation for the CAC Passerelle Brest, which she extended to the MAC Lyon. ...

More Works By: Marilou Poncin