Opening on Thursday, November 12, from 6pm to 9pm, on the occasion of Nuit des Bains.

Xippas Geneva presents a solo exhibition by Marina Faust, bringing together sculptural works and images in which familiar things acquire unexpected forms of life. From the Ambulants and Rolling Stools to her works on paper, Faust returns to a simple process: taking something apart to discover what else it can become.

A chandelier normally belongs above us. In Faust’s Ambulants, it is suspended at human height within a wheeled metal framework. Assembled from vintage components and powered by batteries, these sculptures no longer depend on a fixed place in a room. Fragments of different periods meet in a structure that leaves its supports exposed. An object associated with domestic display becomes a mobile presence, unsettling the conventions attached to its former place and function.

The Rolling Stools undergo a related transformation. Vintage seats, coloured sheepskin and clusters of industrial wheels come together in forms that suggest small creatures. Their previous life remains recognisable, even as their unexpected proportions give them a character of their own.

For the Faces, Faust begins with a children’s sticker album of incomplete female portraits. She tears, recombines and photographs its elements, then prints the resulting images on semi-transparent tissue paper. The portraits retain the ruptures of their making. Éric Troncy describes this process as a way to “keep the idea of a perfect woman at bay”1. The Panoramas expand this fractured visual language across a wider field.

Photography remains a thread between these works: collages become photographs, while light and framing enter the space of sculpture. Describing Faust’s broader practice, Christiane Kuhlmann writes: “She deliberately undermines our accustomed ideas about things, the conventions we normally associate with them.”2