More is More:
Defiance, Destabilisation, and Visibility in Claire Fontaine’s “Show Less”
Words By: Carolina Fernandez
Images By: Christa Holka | Courtsey of Mimosa House
For the collective Claire Fontaine, art is a means of political resistance against systemic injustice. Her latest exhibition at London’s Mimosa House, curated by Daria Khan, brings together new and existing works which destabilise language and expose power structures. Show Less is a collection that is acutely aware of its audience. It is bold work which demands to be seen and provokes strong reactions. Through the clever interplay of different mediums — from neon and lightboxes, to paintings and sculptures — this is art that also brings into question who is looking at it, and how.
The show begins before you even step inside. Refusing the bounds of the gallery, a neon installation in the street-facing window declares Fatherfucker to all who pass. A mirror to the familiar insult “motherfucker”, Claire Fontaine unsettles our patriarchal assumptions of male dominance, bringing to the forefront questions of abuse and victimisation. This gendered inversion of language also exposes the violence embedded in everyday speech. How it hides in plain sight in the words we inherit, repeat, and rarely question.
Inside, the gallery floor is entirely covered with pages from The Guardian newspaper, taken from this year, 2025. The effect is immediately overwhelming. Headlines of war and suffering compete with full-page advertisements. Photos depict a dizzying myriad of people, places and events from across the world. My eyes blur across columns of small print, and amid the sheer number of articles, words cease to function as language. This isn’t communication, it's a carpet pattern. Something we must trod over to access the rest of the artwork. Here, the way we move in this gallery seems to parallel the apathy and disconnect that have become an unfortunate feature of the constant stream of information in the age of 24-hour news cycles and endlessly scrollable social media feeds.
At the same time, snatches of phrases and images do escape this flood of information, often randomly catching the viewer’s gaze and causing the artwork, which seems to “float” above, to enter into dialogue with the current economic and political moment. These dialogues will be in a state of flux, with new meanings evolving as the news itself becomes outdated over the course of the show’s run.
Haunting, and especially topical given the recent ceasefire in Gaza (which began to come into effect the same day this exhibition opened, on October 10th) are two sculptures from Claire Fontaine’s Brickbat series. These are photocopied book covers which are wrapped around bricks, evoking a projectile wrapped in a message, ready to be thrown through a window. This potential for violence embodied in the Brickbat seems to speak to ongoing debates on how social liberation is to be achieved— does peaceful protest work? is violence the only language that the oppressor responds to?
Flowers of Palestine Brickbat also recalls ecological devastation; whole neighbourhoods levelled to mere brick and rubble. To See in the Dark Brickbat is made from the cover of a book about Palestine and visual activism. But of course, in the Brickbat form, both of these texts are utterly inaccessible; as silent as stone… as a gravestone? A zip-tie binds the latter Brickbat “closed”. It draws to mind the issue of censorship which has often characterised Western coverage of this genocide. I also think of the suppression of protest here in the UK— the absurdity of pensioners, doctors, and other peaceful protestors similarly bound in handcuffs for supporting the group Palestine Action.
Elsewhere, Claire Fontaine turns to images sourced from the internet and enlarges them to huge proportions on lightboxes. One is an illustration smuggled out from a Yemini prison in 2018, depicting the physical and sexual abuse that the inmate experienced; the genitals of a guard scribbled out before its circulation online. Another image is a medieval-style drawing of uncertain origin, depicting a woman in the arms of a demonic figure where it is unclear whether she is being protected or imprisoned. Each of these images are filtered through the lens of a shattered smartphone screen. To me, the cracks on these images are a commentary on how suffering is circulated and consumed— through the glowing screens of our phones; through the removed safety of an art gallery. Viewers are urged to engage with the politics of their seeing. What does it mean to look at pain that is not your own? When does visibility become another form of violation?
In a world which polices the female body, Show Less puts her boldly on display. The first accurate depiction of female genitalia in Western art history — Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’origine du monde— becomes a site for intervention. Twelve commissioned recreations of this work are each layered by Claire Fontaine in a different colour. Across the repetitions, the hues evoke spills, bruises and bodily fluids. This strategy of vandalism underscores the vulnerability of the naked body, while recalling both concealment and acts of violation imposed by patriarchal power.
Show Less is an unflinching exhibition, unafraid to display what others might deem too vulgar, too violent, or simply “too much”. Upon leaving the gallery, the words of the poet Cesar Cruz come to mind.
