MO.CO.

With your VIP card (valid for two people) you benefit from free admissions at MO.CO. from August 24 to September 6 included. Please check the opening times and dates on the website.

 

Under the Skin

June 13 to October 11 2026

This summer MO.CO. Panacée presents a group exhibition exploring monstrosity, the monstrous, and mutant forms in contemporary art. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, we live in a time of monsters. Gramsci may have been reflecting on interregnum, a moment of legal and political in-betweenness in which legality becomes suspended, and which, in his case, preceded the rise of fascism in the 20th century. Yet the present also does not seem immune to what can only be described as the monstrous, without, however, being able to define it more precisely. According to the teratologist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the monster represents everything that a society tries to reject or suppress. It is an error, difference, deviance, excess.

 

While these terms were initially ascribed to monstrosity as a biological anomaly, viewed from a scientific and medical perspective, they now extend more broadly to the notion of the social monster: a being, an idea, that reflects the current state of a society and its collective imaginary. Through nearly 80 works by over 20 artists, dating from the 1970s to today, the exhibition Under the Skin does not claim to diagnose monstrosity, but it delves into Pandora’s box to reveal that the monstrous is often found not at such a distant remove as one might imagine, easily inhabiting one side of the epidermis as the other.

Being Here | Now | Everywhere

Kiki Smith

June 13 to October 11 2026

In parallel with the group exhibition Under the skin, presented at MO.CO. Panacée that will explore monstrous and mutant forms in contemporary art, the MO.CO. presents this summer the great American artist Kiki Smith. After having dedicated its spaces to the works of contemporary women artists such as Berlinde De Bruyckere, Huma Bhabha or Françoise Pétrovitch, we will celebrate the generous work of an artist who has for more than forty years worked through an incredible wide range of materials, in order to explore the question of ways of being oneself in the world – socially, organically, spiritually, as animals or stars.

 

Kiki Smith, an American artist born in Germany in 1954, has developed a multidisciplinary practice since the 1980s, mixing sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings, books, tapestries and various objects. One of the characteristics of her works is experimentation through diversity and the rejection of any form of hierarchy. A central subject remains the human body, often feminine – its anatomy, its imprint, its relationship to the living. Sometimes altered or fragmented, it also appears to be peaceful, unifying and a meeting point of energies.

 

 

https://www.moco.art/fr

 

Informations

 

Address: 13 rue de la République et 14 rue de l'Ecole de Pharmacie, 34000 Montpellier

Poster of the group exhibition Under the Skin

Poster of the exhibition Being Here | Now | Everywhere of Kiki Smith