Manque de mordant (Lacking Bite) is a personal exhibition that reflects on the act of collecting, both personal and within an institutional context.

Collecting is a reassuring and minor ambition for Sarah. It is the act of collecting that's her focus, not accumulation. For much time teeth, bone, stones, glass beads, lone earrings have lain quietly in her archive of brown cardboard boxes. Occasionally, these items are transformed and repurposed into artworks.

The sculptural works in Manque de mordant contain such items; stones and glass beads now blanketed in ceramic and silver from found earrings now recast into presentoirs. Each transformative act has a spectral quality that elicits their former owner's life.

Collecting has recently come to the foreground of Sarah's work. Both as meditative practice and as part of her work as Artist in Residence with the Linden Museum (GE). It's here that Sarah has immersed herself in this subject that's been at the periphery of her reflections, the metabolic museum (Clementine Deliss). Her outset enquiry asks: how the ethnographic museum can function as a living and unfolding organism? A structure that isn't locked into a paradigmatic division of subject-object, an institution that doesn't "manque de mordant" as it directly addresses questions of collection provenance.

While at the Linden Museum, Sarah will produce an edition that addresses the politics of artifact provenance through the unfolding of alternative narratives. On the debut of this long-term project, Manque de mordant is the occasion to present new works-in-progress that collage and mass her together initial reflections.

Room sheet.

Manque de mordant - 2022 - Atelier W - Pantin, Paris