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FEMGEN

Oct 20, 2024 - Oct 26, 2025

Overview

Challenging traditional ideals of beauty and femininity, FEMGEN examines how identity is coded, manufactured, and performed in a posthuman era.

- FEMGEN

Now in its fourth edition, FEMGEN Paris brings together female-identifying and non-binary artists shaping the future of generative art. Curated by Micol Apruzzese and Alex Estorick since 2022, the exhibition pairs four emerging artists with pioneers from the Le Random collection, fostering intergenerational dialogue through code and curated conversation.
Through its physical installation at Artverse in Paris and online at Fellowship, FEMGEN traces new genealogies of media, challenging universal ideals of beauty and femininity that encode Western image culture. Set alongside an array of historic works by Nancy Burson, Analivia Cordeiro, Copper Giloth, and Vera Molnar, new series by contemporary artists Gretchen Andrew, Hermine Bourdin, Saeko Ehara, and Jake Elwes explore the ways identity is manufactured and performed in a posthuman age.

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Hermine Bourdin

Universal Venus

2025

Details

Artwork ID
16
I have long been fascinated by symbols of femininity and the earliest representations of the human body. Prehistoric Venus figurines, created more than 20,000 years ago, are among the first artistic images of humankind: they embody fertility, nature, and the life force itself.
With Universal Venus, I aim to reframe these primordial figures in the age of artificial intelligence. In response to Nancy Burson’s Goddess (Mary, Quan Yin & Isis), which merged the faces of multiple spiritual figures to create a universal image of the sacred, I bring together the bodies of prehistoric Venuses from across cultures and geographies to generate a universal Venus.
As a foundation for this work, I created a database of Venus figurines from across the globe. Each entry is carefully documented with details such as dimensions, materials, photographs, and discovery sites, bringing together fragments of prehistory into a single archive.
From this database, I have trained an AI to generate new, imagined Venuses. The algorithm, informed by the gathered data, merges or reinterprets figurines, assigning them speculative materials, textures, and even fictive contexts of discovery. These digital composites are not ends in themselves, but become models for sculpture, rematerialized in clay or stoneware. In this way, I return Burson’s digital exploration into the physical realm, translating AI’s speculative forms into tangible objects.
The works oscillate between the archaic and the contemporary. Born from the memory of the first human images, yet shaped by today’s technological tools. Ultimately, Universal Venus explores how ancestral archetypes can be reborn through contemporary means, and how the universal can emerge from diversity, hybridity, and reinvention.

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