This exhibition brings together video works from the FRAC Corsica collection – each tracing the paths of women caught between displacement, memory, and erasure. Through sparse gestures, traversed landscapes, and reassembled archives, these films suggest alternative ways of inhabiting a world that often withdraws or breaks apart.
Far from offering a single narrative, the exhibition embraces fragments – stories that emerge through the texture of moving images. Here, we encounter an Uzbek activist erased from official histories, an Iranian survivor whose presence merges with the branches of a tree, a Mediterranean figure wielding both seduction and defiance, and a contemporary siren diving through the ruins of a Roman city swallowed by the sea. These presences speak not from the center, but from the edges – from places marked by dispossession, forced migration, or the demand to vanish. And yet, they persist. They return through the image, transformed.
Rather than offering a message, these works create a space of resonance – where filmed bodies become sites of projection, attention, and quiet insistence. We do not hear confessions, but traces. What we witness is a form of resilience that doesn’t seek visibility so much as it claims duration.
This exhibition is presented through the Wonder Women festival – a program initiated by the Domus Art Residency in Galatina – as part of an ongoing curatorial exchange shaped by shared concerns and affinities.
Emilija Škarnulytė
Sunken Cities (2011)
Video
Collection FRAC Corsica
In Sunken Cities, Emilija Škarnulytė merges documentary, mythology, and performance through the figure of the siren — a creature at once ancient and speculative. Filmed in the submerged ruins of Baiae, a Roman resort city swallowed by the sea, the video follows the artist, trained in monofin diving, as she silently navigates underwater remnants of former grandeur. Baiae was famed for its volcanic hot springs and therapeutic architecture. But by the 16th century, it had been abandoned - its ruins gradually engulfed by the sea due to the same geothermal forces that once made it flourish. Gliding through the remains of a vanished civilization, the artist’s presence evokes both loss and transformation. The work invites reflection on the impermanence of power, the fragility of built environments, and the ways in which history resurfaces - half-erased, half-imagined. The siren, both witness and survivor, becomes a vessel through which we contemplate deep time and the uneasy continuity between past and future.
Emilija Škarnulytė was born in 1987 in Lithuania. She studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and at the Academy of Contemporary Art in Tromsø, Norway. In 2019, she received the Future Generation Art Prize from the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. Her work, which moves between fiction and documentary, often takes the form of immersive installations that combine geological, mythological, and political dimensions. She explores submerged infrastructures, cosmological scales, and the shifting boundaries of the human condition.
Agnès Accorsi
L’Âme hospitalière (2002)
Video
Collection FRAC Corsica
On the Corsican shoreline, a woman strolls - calm, enigmatic - evoking a cinematic memory: perhaps a distant echo of Marianne Renoir walking alongside Ferdinand Griffon in Pierrot le fou. But here, the figure carries a machine gun. Neither passive muse nor romantic rebel, she merges both roles, embodying seduction and danger in a single gesture. Like the jellyfish drifting beneath the surface of the Mediterranean, her presence signals both beauty and threat. Between the nonchalance of summer and the latent violence of armed resistance, the film inhabits a zone of tension. The title - L’Âme hospitalière, or “The Hospitable Soul” - borrows a lyric from Adamo’s 1969 song Les Filles du bord de mer, but strips it of its male gaze and nostalgic softness. What remains is a woman without narrative, without context — and without apology. The work quietly undermines familiar roles assigned to women in both cinema and collective memory. The character’s anonymity becomes a stance: she no longer needs someone else’s story to assert her own.
Agnès Accorsi was born in 1967 in Ajaccio, where she lives and works. A graduate of the École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence, her practice spans drawing, installation, objects, and video. She explores femininity through a language that embraces sensuality, strength, and mystery - often blending opposing forces within the same image. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the FRAC Corsica from December 2014 to March 2015.
Niyaz Azadikhah
Refuge (2020)
Video
Collection FRAC Corsica
Refuge unfolds in a symbolic landscape where trees are formed by the silhouettes of women wearing the hijab. Their bodies, fused with trunks and branches, stand as pillars of strength, stillness, and protection. In the background, a few solitary figures move toward these shelters - fragile presences seeking comfort in a world marked by instability. The video evokes the precariousness of displacement and the longing for a place of safety, while quietly celebrating sorority as a political force. These trees are not just metaphors - they are guardians, memory-holders, spaces where collective care takes root. In a world fractured by violence and erasure, Refuge becomes a vision of resistance shaped by empathy and endurance.
Niyaz Azadikhah, born in 1984 in Tehran, is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist based in Paris. Her work spans painting, embroidery, and animation, and often begins with personal encounters - confessions, childhood memories, emotional scars, or cultural taboos. Through stylized and intimate forms, she constructs fragile yet powerful narratives that challenge the marginalization of the female body in Iranian society. Her videos, often brief in duration, carry a strong poetic charge, placing tenderness and trauma side by side. Her works have been shown at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Fondazione Imago Mundi, MACBA, and the Palais de Tokyo.
Bouchra Khalili
Anya (Straight Stories – Part 2) (2008)
Video
Collection FRAC Corsica
Anya is the second chapter of Bouchra Khalili's Straight Stories series, which explores narratives of migration through personal testimonies. In this video, a young Iraqi woman recounts her journey: after fleeing Iraq, she has lived in Turkey for twelve years, awaiting a visa to join an uncle in Australia. She works illegally, without status, suspended in a geographical and administrative limbo. The camera never shows Anya. Only her calm and determined voice testifies to her presence. This formal choice underscores the tension between visibility and erasure, between existence and absence. The wintry landscape of Istanbul becomes a mirror of a frozen destiny, a life in perpetual transit. Anya's intimate narration, devoid of pathos, reveals the strength of those who, despite waiting and uncertainty, continue to believe in a possible future.
Bouchra Khalili is a French-Moroccan artist born in 1975 in Casablanca. She studied cinema at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy. Her work, combining video, installation, photography, and silkscreen printing, explores notions of citizenship, identity, and collective memory. Through personal stories and oral testimonies, she gives voice to those marginalized by official history. Her works have been presented in numerous international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and documenta 14 in Kassel. She is also a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Saodat Ismailova
Her Right (2020)
Video installation
Collection FRAC Corsica
Her Right brings together legendary women from Uzbek cinema - heroines whose gestures, silences, and gazes have shaped the collective imagination. The title is borrowed from a 1934 film directed by G. Cherniak. Through a montage of scenes from classic Uzbek films, Saodat Ismailova revisits the country's history and highlights the overlooked role women played in its evolution. The film references the Hujum, a Soviet campaign launched in 1924 aimed at "liberating" Muslim women, notably by banning the veil. While officially presented as an emancipatory project, the campaign was often perceived locally as a violent process of cultural erasure - a forced alignment with Soviet values and Russian norms. The veil, far from being only a religious marker, had become for many a symbol of cultural identity. Her Right uses excerpts from films by directors such as Latif Fayziyev, Ali Khamrayev, and Shukhrat Abbasov, spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s. These fragments, drawn from VHS and BetaCam copies unearthed in private archives, are set to a soundtrack by London-based musician Seaming To. Through this assemblage of silent cinema, the film reflects on the complex role of film as a political tool, while honoring the resilience of women - both on screen and behind it — in the making of a national consciousness.
Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist born in Tashkent. She came of age in the post-Soviet era and now divides her time between Paris and Uzbekistan, where her native region remains a major source of inspiration. After graduating from the Tashkent State Art Institute, she joined the Fabrica research center in Treviso, where she directed Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea, awarded Best Documentary at the Torino Film Festival in 2004. In 2005, she was a DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin, where she developed 40 Days of Silence, her first feature film, which premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2014. She represented Central Asia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with her video installation Zukhra.
Natacha Lesueur
Maramarama (2016)
Video, 2'20
Collection FRAC Corsica
A forest emerges, bathed in a monochromatic red light, creating a surreal and unsettling atmosphere. The absence of human presence and the apparent stillness of the scene heighten the sense of unreality and solitude. Lesueur's deliberate choice to saturate the scene in red radically alters our natural perception of the tree motifs. This red monochrome can be interpreted in various ways: perhaps it evokes urgency, danger, passion, or violence. This single color modification invites the viewer to project their own feelings or interpretations onto what would otherwise be a natural and peaceful scene. In the context of Lesueur's work, which often explores the relationships between appearance and reality, as well as image manipulation to reveal what is hidden to the naked eye, the red may symbolize the filter through which we see the world, a world altered by cultural and personal perceptions. The derealization produced by the red color in Maramaramaunderscores the idea that what we see is a construction. Lesueur reminds us that art is not a mere reproduction of reality but a creation that reflects the artist's vision and intentions, allowing for a deeper exploration of themes and emotions. The presence of palm trees suggests that the title could be a word of Polynesian origin, often meaning "clarity" or "light" in several languages of that region. In this context, the title might refer to a kind of revelation or illumination, in any case, an awakening.
Natacha Lesueur, born in 1971 in Cannes, is a French contemporary artist whose artistic practice primarily revolves around themes of the body, food, and beauty, using photography as her main medium. Her academic journey led her to the Villa Arson in Nice, a renowned institution of higher artistic education, where she graduated in 1993. Lesueur's work is distinguished by an original approach that fuses photography with elements borrowed from fashion and gastronomy. She creates images where food transforms into body adornment, thus questioning notions of aesthetics, identity, and consumption.