Sorbonne Artgallery

Curated by Paul Ardenne - Untraceable Body.

 

"Nadia Russell Kissoon's artistic commitment merges several approaches: the creation of visual artworks; mediation and encounters in public spaces; and care. Founder, in 2010, of L’Agence Créative, this Bordeaux-based artist notably promotes her business through an original mobile installation, the Tinbox, a mobile gallery that has seen several variations. This showcase, a striking and attractive red, is carried on the back in its smallest version and towed by a car or van in its larger versions. It is installed wherever the artist or her collaborators decide – the best possible way to foster contact, directly engaging with people in the street or public squares. In her Tinbox, the artist presents not her own creations but, in a collaborative spirit, those of other artists. Desacralization, spontaneity, facilitated exchanges… the Tinbox aims to break the mold of the 'White'." Cube, this institutional exhibition space with regulated and limited access, is, strictly speaking, a social vehicle. It is a striking and practical example of a traveling museum, conceived in the tradition of the portable exhibition concept initiated a century ago by Marcel Duchamp with his Box in a Suitcase.

 

Among the themes Nadia Russell Kissoon explores artistically, that of care is prominent—a constant. This attention to human fragility and the means of reducing it, or at the very least, raising awareness, leads the artist to work, when necessary, with practitioners in the medical field, even within hospitals. In this aspect, art acts as a form of treatment: because it informs, because it aestheticizes, because it encourages putting words to illness or suffering, because it becomes a "connecting force," creating bonds and solidarity. This is the spirit of the project undertaken by the artist, from a feminist perspective, on Endometriosis, this chronic gynecological disease from which she herself suffers, is something she is committed to raising awareness about. Her goal is to move this pathology beyond the purely medical sphere by exposing its reality, effects, and lived experience in public spaces, for the purpose of broadening awareness. This is achieved through the Tinbox project, or wherever the artist intends to engage with potential venues, art spaces, schools, clinics, or cultural and community centers.

 

Exposing a Disease

 

Offering an image, an artistic "vision" of endometriosis, is no easy feat, at least not using traditional methods of artistic expression. Nadia Russell Kissoon tactically employs a broader semantic approach: the creation of images, certainly, but also the organization of debates, conferences, and networking opportunities between patients, healthcare professionals, and the public, favoring a "Medical-Care" approach akin to nursing. This is one example. This is accomplished art, described as "useful," situated, contextualized, even therapeutic, setting concrete objectives, in this case educational, exchange-based, and supportive (the artist as "helper"). Breaking the isolation of her fellow sick women, some of whom may be artists, like the visual artists she brought together during the summer of 2025 at the French Cultural Center in Berlin for the exhibition "Breaking this Silence," means recognizing their dignity despite their disability, enlightening the public, and more broadly, acknowledging this reality inherent to the human body, contemporary as it has always been: the possibility of ill health. If the human body that Nadia Russell Kissoon describes is heroic, it is not because it stands up to the adversity of history or continues to shine like Narcissus in a world desperately more ugly than beautiful, but rather because it must confront illness, this deviation in the constitution and representation of the body, without any other vital option. Perfect.

 

The works presented by the artist in 2026 at the Sorbonne ArtGallery—images, in this case—are part of the Endometriosis Academy project, launched in September 2021 by Nadia Russell Kissoon. Universal and invisible, yet affecting millions of people, women and transgender individuals worldwide, endometriosis is a painful chronic disorder that can lead to infertility. This disease, explains Nadia Russell Kissoon, “was long considered gynecological and is now recognized as systemic (Hugh S. Taylor, The Lancet, 2021).” Endometriosis Academy, the artist’s project, focuses from this perspective on “narratives of endometriosis,” an untreated condition “yet common,” as well as on the “epistemic injustices” it engenders. A few words about the origin of this project: while it owes much to Nadia Russell Kissoon's intimate and personal experience with illness itself, it also stems from work the artist conducted with sociologist Bruno Latour "in the form of an inquiry carried out within the framework of the political, artistic, and scientific protocol 'Where to Land?'"

 

Between evocation, education, and activism

 

"Aestheticizing" an illness, producing a representation of it primarily through images to generate interest: this is not a straightforward matter, especially when one intends to avoid taking the easy way out. The simplest, and most common, approach in this case is to merely freeze the sick human body visually in a painful posture. Showing a bedridden body in a medicalized environment, for example. Or again, to offer the viewer a stylized image of a face contorted in pain, or the compassionate depiction of a living person asleep, on the verge of catalepsy or death. A lack of imagination, in essence, reigns supreme, more so, in any case, than the concern that guides Nadia Russell Kissoon: to provide a representation of endometriosis and its physical and psychological effects that is simultaneously a composite of images, performances, public education, and personal and media attention given to the patient—a whole didactic apparatus of which the nine visuals presented at the Sorbonne ArtGallery are, in this instance, only the tip of the iceberg. These visuals, precisely. These works, which can combine text and image, give prominence not to the color red, the color of blood (blood as the flow of life, menstrual blood, blood of pain), but to the hue of orange, the color, according to the artist, of the chakra of creative energy, the sacred chakra Svadhisthana in Hindu mythology. Another artistic focus is the artist's attention to the female genitalia, here stylized. Some of these visuals are inspired by performances carried out in natural or public spaces by the artist, either in the Landes region, not far from where she lives, or in the countryside of Kochi, in southern India, as part of the local biennial where the Endometriosis Academy project was received in November-December 2025. Other visuals evoke certain historical points of view on gynecology, those of specialists of the past often suspected of linking the uterus, the seat of endometriosis, and hysteria, the initial stage of madness, a frequent aberration of patriarchy... Uniting graphic style, color work and pedagogy, none of these visuals expresses any pity or a wounded representation of the status of the sick. Rather, the artist subjects the viewer's gaze and consciousness to a panorama of optical and mental figures in which a poorly understood or misunderstood illness can come to be embodied, alongside the visual exposition of an artistic engagement with the very truth of the illness. This work, akin to testimony, also expresses a deliberate appropriation. Art signifies here that it does not abandon this aspect, without ever succumbing to pathos or the sin of labeling. To suffer, yes, but also to persevere. Ill, yes, but still alive among the living and, as such, fully human. Art as a therapeutic process, in its own way, in short.

 

PAUL ARDENNE