Foreigners everywhere is the ambiguous sentence that Claire Fontaine has chosen to reproduce in neon in all languages except english. Taken from the name of an Italian anti-racist group, these two words reflect on the most frightening sides of globalisation : our loss of familiarity with any place and our fear of the others. The form, the neon sign, initially supposed to display a clear commercial message and later used by conceptual artists’ to communicate tautology, here functions as a warning or a question asked in a specific location. Who are the foreigners and who are the natives in a world fabricated by capitalism?

Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box - as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes - there is always the possibility of what she calls the "human strike." Only two years old, Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.

Recent shows include, Someone else with my fingerprints, Chantal Crousel, Paris, Taccuini di guerra incivile, T293, Naples, Téléphone Arabe, Air de Paris, Paris, Otra de Vaqueros, Laboratorio de Alameda, Mexico City, Grey Flags, The Sculpture Center, New York, Group Therapy, Museo d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Bolzano, Incipit, Espace Paul Ricard, Paris and The Look of Law, University of California, Irvine.

he is now preparing a book to be published by les Editions La Fabrique, Paris around the concepts of ready-made artist and human strike.

RSFA, Grand Street, NY
Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY