Emilie Pitoiset
Artist
Fall 2026
- Visual Arts
- Los Angeles
“When we speak, are we ventriloquists of ourselves?”
I develop a practice spanning sculpture, installation, film and performance, conceived as choreographic devices. My works materialize silent actions, afterimages and off-screen situations. They replay the tragicomic scenarios that structure our social lives.
I am interested in a recurring instability: the moment when a body no longer quite coincides with itself. My works often draw on the material vocabulary of performance — stage objects and fragments of gestures.
Her work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Tai Kwun Contemporary Hong Kong, Bozar Brussels and Witte de With Rotterdam, among others. Her work is held in collections including the Centre Pompidou, CNAP / Fonds national d’art contemporain, Pinakothek der Moderne, DZ Bank Collection and Philara Collection.
More than fifty years after The Exorcist, the demonic voice created by Mercedes McCambridge continues to haunt cinema, even though the actress was initially left in the shadows. In Los Angeles, I will take this performance as the starting point for a research project exploring the dissociation between body and voice, extending her ongoing investigation into bodies pushed to perform to the point of exhaustion, erasure or disappearance.
In a city dominated by images, Ghost Singer shifts attention to what unfolds between the visible and the audible. As Steven Connor writes in Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, illusion depends less on an intensification of hearing than on its failures: we also believe what we think we see speaking.
As the capital of cinema, Los Angeles offers a particularly fertile ground for exploring the invisible mechanisms that connect — or dissociate — a voice, a body and an image.
In partnership with
Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut