Artists in residence

Born in France, Benoît Piéron lives and works in Paris.

Benoît Piéron is interested in the sensuality of plants, the boundaries of the body and the temporality of waiting rooms. His practice revolves around patchworks, installations, existential gardening and wallpaper designs. Having always experienced illness as a partner in life, the hospital environment is his ecosystem. He seeks to produce alternative expressions of illness, seeing it as a potential. Far from the romantic heroism of the usual metaphors for illness, Benoît Piéron places himself in a grey and joyful zone.

His practice is inspired by the experience of waiting, and explores the ambiguous boundaries between health and illness, presence and absence, inside and outside, the body and the architectural, temporal and medical structures that shape it. Recent exhibitions include the Liverpool Biennial (United Kingdom, 2023), the Palais de Tokyo (France, 2023), the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection (France, 2023) and the Fondation Pernod Ricard (France, 2022). His work will be shown in two solo exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery (United Kingdom, 2023) and mumok (Austria, 2024).

During his residency, Benoît Piéron will develop a project combining art and health. Drawing on his research on sexuality in hospital, initiated at the Antre Peaux for the exhibition “Bandage”, and supported by the Carta Bianca Prize, Benoît Piéron will engage a conversation with (im)patients about their experience of pleasure in hospital.

Informed by feminist theories and practices, his working methodology aims at creating, through reversed pedagogy, safe spaces to welcome, exchange and share patients’ experiences and perspectives. 

Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey is a writer, poet and philosopher. Now living in Paris, he was born in Port-au-Prince in October 1986. He studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in parallel with his activities as an actor. He won the first prize for poetry of the Pléiade Group at the State University of Haiti with Mots épars, of which an eponymous collection was published with the texts of the two other winners. Then he published in 2010, still in Port-au-Prince and on his own account, Emmuré, his first booklet of verse.

Rapatriés, the first novel of Nehemy Pierre-Dahomey was published in 2017 by Editions du Seuil. Several times awarded (Société des Gens de Lettres, Carbet des lycéens de la Caraïbe, Ciné del Duca de l’Académie Française), it meets a critical and public success.

In March 2021, Combats, his second novel, was published by Seuil.

Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey diversifies his activities within the framework of a residency at the Cité internationale des arts (2020/2021) with the support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation. He wrote and developed his first short fiction film entitled Humus Baobab, dealing with the detour of resistance, and which takes place in the traditional Haitian dance scene in France.

“The excellent reputation is so rarely founded that I was almost astonished, often moved, to experience six such generous, calm and powerful months of friendly and artistic encounters.”