THE ART OF SURVIVAL/ BABY DOLL SALOON

At the heart of the intuitive and almost experimental collaboration between Sylvie Fleury and Angela Bulloch—now brought together in the exhibition THE ART OF SURVIVAL / BABY DOLL SALOON in Charlottenburg—are a series of firework performances the artists staged in London (1993), Dijon (1994), and Berlin (1999). Rather than bursting into color across the sky, the fireworks in these works seemed to explode within the space itself. Soot marks left behind on white walls bore witness to the pyrotechnic interventions. These attacks on the interior—long symbolically charged as the realm of the domestic and confined— can be read as a casual yet sharp critique of a visual tradition that, for centuries, has placed women within enclosed, private settings: from Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (c. 1670), to the impressionist paintings of Berthe Morisot, to Edgar Degas’ Woman Ironing (1887).

In their second joint exhibition in 1999 at Mehdi Chouakri in Berlin (once again presented in collaboration with Galerie Esther Schipper in 2025), Bulloch and Fleury showed the installation A Donut in Paris (1999). Two soft sculptures meet: a deflated donut by Bulloch and a collapsed rocket by Fleury. The shapes function as unmistakable gender metaphors. The rocket—an archetypal phallic symbol—has lost its tension; masculinity is shown as emptied out. The woman, masked as a donut, is simply exhausted.

The exhibitions at Mehdi Chouakri reintroduce Bulloch and Fleury’s joint works to the public, many of which may be unfamiliar even to those who follow their individual practices. Spanning over three decades, the show includes documentation and visual materials—some of which the artists have rearranged or reinterpreted for the current context. A new film collage, for instance, interweaves footage of the firework performances with stills from their three-minute short film Should I Stay or Should I Go?, recorded early in their collaboration at the Trocadero, a shopping and entertainment center near London’s Piccadilly Circus. The clip captures the artists doing karaoke in a setting that feels both mundane and theatrical.

Today, as categories and classifications once again become tools of control and exclusion, it’s worth revisiting the playful yet pointed questions Fleury and Bulloch have been raising since the 1990s—questions that deserve not just to be asked anew, but to be taken seriously.

–Juliet Kothe

Photo © Andrea Rossetti