Curated by Daria Khan
10 October – 6 December 2025
Preview 9 October 6–8:30pm
Mimosa House is delighted to announce that the autumn show is by Claire Fontaine. This will be the Palermo-based artists;s first solo presentation in a publicly-funded institution in London and will include new site specific work made for the occasion.
Coinciding with Frieze London, Show Less is curated by Mimosa House’s Founding Director and Curator, Daria Khan. It brings together new and existing works that offer a visual and theoretical exploration of feminism, which has shaped Claire Fontaine’s long-standing practice.
A new site specific installation Newsfloor (The Guardian) 2025 across the entirety of the exhibition space, is inspired by a photograph of Henri Matisse in his studio taken by Robert Capa in 1949. Newsfloor transforms the white cube into a space where Claire Fontaine’s sculptures and lightboxes ‘float’ on top of the latest news, images and advertisements. The contents that arise from the newspaper’s pages associate randomly with the artworks creating unforeseen meanings and raising questions about the current state of the world as described by the media.
At the heart of the exhibition is a reflection on how visibility is produced and policed, how words and images collide in the digital era creating a specific form of political and historical disorientation. Show Less, the exhibition title, alludes to a common expression and criticism of a woman’s attire, but it also refers to the shrinking of freedom of expression that has intensified globally across the cultural field during the last two years, creating self censorship amongst authors and artists. Claire Fontaine exhibits faithful, life-size oil painted reproductions of iconic masterpieces such as L’origine du monde, L’homme mort and Arearea used as a base for interventions by the artist. Here, vandalism is quoted as a strategy that exposes the fragility of cultural values and their entanglement with today’s political crises.
Claire Fontaine’s Brickbats are sculptures consisting of bricks and photocopied book covers. Inspired by projectiles wrapped in a warning message and thrown through a window as a threat. With this gesture, these works underline both the difficulty many people face in accessing theory and literature, and the declining cultural weight of printed matter in the digital age.
Claire Fontaine’s new neon Fatherfucker, shown in the street facing gallery vitrine of Mimosa House, inverts the familiar insult “motherfucker” to expose the gendered violence embedded in language. The artists take a word normally tied to mothers, hence to the feminine, and reverse it onto fathers, the figure of patriarchal power. In doing so, they reveal how insults disproportionately mark the feminine, rarely the masculine. The reversal conjures uncomfortable associations of the father as abuser, corrupt authority or paedophile, unsettling the habitual insult and forcing us to ask: who is victim, who is violator?
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 will tour to WoW Foundation Rome ETS in 2027 alongside the launch of a new publication in collaboration with Mousse Publishing documenting both presentations.
Supported by:
Public Programme:
Tuesday 14 October
9:30–11am
Breakfast and Private View
You are invited to join Mimosa House for a special breakfast view of Claire Fontaine’s solo show, Show Less, with an in-conversation at 10am between curator Daria Khan and Claire Fontaine.
Throughout the show a number of events will take place. For details please follow our social media streams @mimosahouselondon or check out our website www/mimosahouse.co.uk
Artist Bio:
Claire Fontaine is a collective feminist conceptual artist founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in Paris in 2004. Since 2017 she lives and works in Palermo. Her name is inspired by Duchamp’s iconic ready-made, the urinal entitled Fontaine, and a famous brand of French notebooks (Clairefontaine); it defines a space where the biographies of the artist is not directly connected to their artworks allowing their research to become a space of freedom and desubjectivisation. The use of appropriation and hijacking in her work stems from the same intention: not highlighting the excellence of the artist’s unique singularity but activating the forms and the forces within visual culture and underlining their political content. Claire Fontaine works in video, sculpture, painting and writing.
The 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 was entitled Foreigners Everywhere after a seminal series of works by Claire Fontaine. Adriano Pedrosa, the curator of the biennale, took inspiration from the artist’s ongoing series of neons, declaring in the press conference: “The backdrop for the work is a world rife with multifarious crisis and challenges around the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories and borders, which reflect the perils and pitfalls of language, translation, nationality, expressing differences and disparities conditioned by identity, race, gender, sexuality, freedom, and human development.”
She has published with Diversity of Aesthetics a conversation with Iman Ganji and José Rosales entitled Foreigners Everywhere in 2022, a comprehensive anthology of her writings with Semiotext(e) in 2020 entitled Human Strike and the Art of Creating Freedom, with a foreword by Hal Foster. The anthology was also published in French by Diaphanes and in Italian by Derive Approdi. The artist’s books Some instructions for the sharing of private property with One Star Press in 2011 and Vivre, vaincre with Dilecta in 2009. Two monographs on the artist have been published by Koenig’s Books: Newsfloor in 2020, with texts by Anita Chari and Jaleh Mansoor and Foreigners Everywhere in 2011, with texts by Letizia Ragaglia, Bernard Blistène, Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, John Kelsey and Hal Foster. The first theoretical monograph about the artist, Claire Fontaine a User’s Manual has been published in 2024 in English by Anita Chari with Lenz Press.
In the Sixtieth Venice Biennale Claire Fontaine has been present in the main exhibition with a large installation of 60 neons from the series Foreigners Everywhere in the Gaggiandre and at the entrance of the central pavilion of the Giardini and in the Corderie. She was also amongst the artists selected in the exhibition With Your Eyes at the Vatican Pavilion Holy See.
Recent solo shows include: Crossing Borders, popoli in movimento, Università di Giurisprudenza di Palermo, Palermo, 2025; Is Freedom Therapeutic? Istituto di Cultura Italiano, New Delhi, 2025; Foreigners Everywhere (Metropolitan Indians), Kieran Nadar Museum, New Delhi, 2025; Between Earth and Sky, Museo Riso, Palermo, 2024; Beauty is a Ready-Made, Fondation Hermès, Seoul, 2024; Star Reply Forward Copy Info Delete, Memphis, Linz, 2022; Siamo con voi nella notte, Museo del 900, Firenze, 2020; I- WE-YES, Studio Concreto, Lecce, 2020; Your Money and Your Life, Galerias Municipais, Lisbona, 2019; La Borsa e la vita, Palazzo Ducale, Genova, 2019; Les printemps seront silencieux, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, 2019; #displaced, Städtische Galerie Norhdorn, Nordhorn, 2019 ; Fortezzuola, Museo Pietro Canonica, 2016; Art Club, Villa Medici, Roma, 2016; Tears, Jewish Museum, New York 2013; 1493, Espacio 1414, San Juan, Puerto Rico 2013; Sell Your Debt, Queen’s Nails, San Francisco 2013; Redemptions, CCA Wattis, San Francisco, 2013; Carelessness causes fire, Audian Gallery, Vancouver 2012; Breakfast starts at midnight, Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation Stockholm 2012; M-A-C-C-H-I-N-A-Z-IO-N-I, Museion, Bolzano, 2012; P.I.G.S., MUSAC, Castilla y León 2011; Economies, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami 2010.
Curator’s Bio:
Daria Khan is the Founding and Artistic Director of Mimosa House, an independent non-profit art institution in London. Dedicated to artistic experimentation and collaboration, Mimosa House supports women and queer artists across generations.
She has been Curator-in-Residence at the MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, and a participant in the EUNIC programme at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She has spoken at conferences and public events in the UK, Europe and the USA, including at the University of Oxford, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou.
Daria received her MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London, and is currently undertaking the PhD Art Programme at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Her current research focuses on curatorial strategies for translating, archiving and exhibiting performative poetry within the context of contemporary visual arts.
Daria’s previous curatorial projects include The Colour of Pomegranate, an exhibition dedicated to Sergei Parajanov at Solyanka Gallery, Moscow; Tender Touches at the Austrian Cultural Forum, London; Mechanisms of Happiness at The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Levitate at Freiraum 21 International, MuseumsQuartier Vienna; the Public Programme of the 5th Moscow Biennial; Transfeminisms at Mimosa House; There Are Other Skies at SMoCA, USA; and Tomaso Binga’s Euforia at Madre Museum, Naples.
About Mimosa House:
Founded in 2017, Mimosa House is an arts organisation that exists to challenge the lack of diversity in the arts, in the UK and beyond. Throughout everything we do, we centre the voices and experiences of women and queer people, with a particular focus on people of colour, and the intersections between. We are the only non-commercial visual arts organisation in the UK to do this, as a key objective in our constitution.
Mimosa House produces 3-4 exhibitions per year and numerous events at our multi-storey venue in Holborn, central London. We have established ourselves as a safe and empowering community space for the wider public to meet, share ideas, and build cross-cultural connections. Through raising awareness about issues of inequality and discrimination, and celebrating diversity, we want to help the public to imagine and create a more equitable society.
Mimosa House is run by a small team supported by an engaged Board of Trustees, our emphasis is on creating an adaptable and supportive environment that prioritises collaborative working, inclusivity and problem solving.
Mimosa House, 47 Theobalds Rd, London, WC1X 8SP
Open Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm
Admission Free–mimosahouse.co.uk–@mimosahouselondon
