Yerba Buena Center for the Art, San Francisco, October-December 2011
installation with wallpaper (16 meters width, 3 meters heigh), several wood sculptures,
and 4 little animations projected into the wallpaper.

You can find the original text of Tiqqun
in English at http://zinelibrary.info/files/YOUNGGIRL2.pdf
in French at http://www.bloom0101.org/jeunefille.pdf


Texts on the wall of the museum :
The old boys' club, approaches various subjects—including idea around desire and judgement—with humor, whimsy, and a lightness of mood, even if the subjects themselves reject this levity. La Destitution de la jeune fille which continues in this playful vein, is a direct response to the book Premiers matérieaux pour une théorie de la jeune fille (aw Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl) written in 2001 by Tiqqun, a largely anonymous French writers collective. The philosophical theory put forward by the group takes form within the work as an epic battle, inspired by the history painting of such canonical artists as Paolo Ucello and Antoine-Jean Gro. Rather than an historical narrative, the Young Girl as a nongendered concept symbolizing the capitalist machine and the meaninglessness of modern life, the collective calls for a new social order in which the Young Girl is overthrown.Echoing the anonymity of their literary brethren, creatures with myriad masks—Native American, Indonesian, Hello Kitty, burqas, football helmets—wage war against commodity culture and empty existence. Far from being a simple notion of good versus bad, however, it is amidst a landscape of chaos and confusion that these creatures fight the battle of the contemporary world.

– Thien Lam, curatorial Assistant





«The Young Girl wears the mask of her face»

– Tiqqun