Chalisée Naamani creates “image dresses” from photographs she takes with her phone or from sources from the internet, which she then transforms into large digital collages and prints on various materials. For her exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, the artist has designed an in-situ installation using associations of images and composite sculptures that explore the many ways of constructing the body. For her exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, the Franco-Iranian artist let herself be guided by the flights of stairs and the seemingly incomplete geometric shape of the space. Perceiving in it a half-octagon and a distant echo of the Iranian zurkhaneh—a term that refers both to a sport and the gymnasium where this national discipline, akin to bodybuilding, wrestling, and resistance to enemy invasions, is practiced—she playfully embraces its forms and makes them resonate in new ways.

In the arena-catwalk-sports hall, she confronts, parades and interweaves a panorama of ways of cultivating a body. The body of her champion grandfather, the body she trains at the gym, and the body of the new-born baby she is nurturing, are all brought together in hybrid compositions that combine personal images with those excavated from the Internet—anonymous archives freely circulating on social networks and other history or self-help books. The images are bodies, and the bodies are images, which it is up to anyone to shape as they wish in order to exist, resist and live freely.