As part of the third edition of the Biennale d'Aix, an exceptional carte blanche has been given to Jeanne Vicérial. Born in 1991 and trained first in costume design, then in fashion design at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, she became in 2019 the first person in France to hold a SACRe doctorate. This dual background, spanning textile craft and research, runs through her entire practice.
Incarnation takes the form of an exhibition trail linking four heritage sites in Aix-en-Provence: the Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme, the Musée des Tapisseries, the Chapelle de la Visitation, exceptionally opened for the occasion, and the sculpture gallery of the Musée Granet. Each site offers a different reading of the same question, that of incarnation, understood as the way in which a body, a material or a belief takes form and presence.
The Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme is conceived as a lived-in studio, revealing the artist's research process. Elsewhere, her sculptures of black and white threads, at once baroque and silent, weave connections between craft, fashion, art and science, and interrogate the female body through the lens of art history, mythology and the sacred. The Musée des Tapisseries presents for the first time the costume drawings that Jeanne Vicérial designed for Lully's opera-ballet Atys, directed by Angelin Preljocaj, premiered in Geneva in 2022 and revived at the Opéra Royal de Versailles in 2026.
The exhibition brings together works on loan from private and public collections alongside pieces conceived specifically for the museums of Aix, under the curatorship of Christel Pélissier-Roy. From one site to the next, thread becomes the material of narrative, and the body, a territory always in transformation.