Photo: Laura Castro Caldas. Edition of 300.

Edition of 26 copies and 4 artist’s proofs, numbered and signed by the artist.

Although the title of this edition, Un jour sans pain* est un jour sans soleil [“A day without bread is a day without sun”], sounds like a typical French saying, it is simply a sentence glimpsed in a bakery where Ana Jotta used to go in Paris. But the asterisk complicates things a little: on the back of the leporello, the artist instructs us to read “pain” in the English, thus adding a sarcastic touch to this commercial motto.

The (absence of) sun and the umbrella, as well as the wallpaper designed for the presentation of the edition at Keijiban, can refer to the tsuyu, the rainy season during which they were exhibited, in the open air.

French artist Joëlle de la Casinière, Portuguese artist Ana Jotta and Flemish artist Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven have in common to pay no fealty to trends of contemporary art. Moreover, they fought unwaveringly throughout their respective careers the need to see their work being given an “official line”. Instead, they stood aside, went underground or remained indifferent to the twists and turns of the art market and institutions. They sometimes created surrogate characters, hid, or playfully modified their names to react to the branding of identity in the artworld, and to the imposed marginalization that they had to cope with as women artists, as did artists living in peripheral geographies. In a way, paradoxically, being marginalized encouraged a calculated versatility of media and styles, and the invention of an idiosyncratic vocabulary, while total freedom remained their one and only rule.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Malmö Konsthall in 2019. More information on the exhibition can be found here.