Gaëlle Choisne: Sculpting the Debris of Empire, Dreaming Decolonial Futures

01/04/2025

Writer: John Tain

Gaëlle Choisne is a French-Haitian visual artist whose multifaceted practice spans sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Deeply influenced by her Caribbean heritage, postcolonial theory, and environmental politics, Choisne constructs fragile, immersive ecosystems that confront the entangled legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and spiritual resistance. Based between Paris and Berlin, her work has been exhibited internationally in biennials and institutions including the Lyon Biennale, Palais de Tokyo, Gwangju Biennale, and Sharjah Biennial.

Choisne's installations are dense, multi-sensory assemblages of industrial materials, organic matter, found objects, and cultural symbols. She often incorporates copper wiring, glass shards, plant matter, and talismanic forms—objects that resonate with both spiritual power and political tension. Rather than presenting clear narratives, her works create spaces of reflection, where histories of violence and survival are held in unstable balance.

A central strand of her practice is the ongoing project Temple of Love (2018–present), a modular series of installations exploring love not only as emotion but as a radical, decolonial force. Through each new iteration, the work becomes a site for healing, memory, and community-building—an evolving architecture of care and protest.

In 2024, Choisne received the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp, recognizing her ability to blend material experimentation with urgent cultural critique. Her artistic ecosystems are not merely visual; they are political spaces that invite viewers to confront inherited histories while imagining new futures rooted in solidarity and repair.

Through a poetic and materially rich language, Gaëlle Choisne offers a powerful vision of contemporary art as a space where beauty, grief, resistance, and resilience coexist—never settled, always in transformation.