Since the sixties, the installations of Marianne Berenhaut (born in 1934 in Belgium) seem familiar to us. The intimacy of bodies and the legacy of history are characteristic of the artist’s work. The assembled objects: lopsided furniture, white linen stuck in an old-fashioned wardrobe, mismatched bedroom that suggests a hasty departure, express in a very tangible way and without human representation, all the throbbing of a lived experience.

The sculptures of Marianne Berenhaut nourishing themselves with everyday objects recovered or found. The playpen dialogues with a deployment of suitcases that are too small. Red pumps bivouacked between shreds of linoleum. A heavy trunk is embedded in a heap of green files with almost illegible cartridges. Decommissioned, smashed typewriters shape a chaotic procession that suggests abandonment. The memory whispers and highlights a decomposed past that generates various interpretations.

The objects collected by Marianne Berenhaut are thus staged and linked in installations designated under the general title ‘Vie Privée’ (Private Life). They then become actors of imaginary situations and stories that each spectator can recompose. Between humor and tragedy, these works are all linked by recurring themes, linked to the personal story of Marianne Berenhaut who lost her parents and her older brother in the Nazi extermination camps as a child. His installations evoke childhood, vain expectation and absence.