'Claire Fontaine' is neither a person nor a fictitious character, but the name of a collaborative shared space. This group of Paris-based performance artists have decided to collectively produce work, which they felt they couldn't otherwise have created, under their individual names. Claire Fontaine proudly refuse to shy away from the implicit political content of their work. The name is borrowed from a famous French high street stationary brand, the kind you would find in a large, conventional shopping mall for example. For Claire Fontaine, this is a thinly veiled political observation about the vacuity of mass produced consumer goods in our global, post-capitalist society. Claire Fontaine incorporates a wide variety of found objects in her work: neon lights, engravings, video installations, sloganeering. Her purpose is openly radical, whilst denying us the possibility to readily identify it or reduce it to conventional interpretations. A Claire Fontaine performance, militantly confronts our subjective notions of political freedom in a wealthy, market driven society. She exposes the often unaddressed undercurrent of political and technological control, embedded in the structure of our increasingly digitalised reality. Although 'Claire Fontaine' is explicitly a collective, 'she' presents herself as a make-believe, individual artist. This enables her to directly interrogate the protocols of emancipation from gender hierarchies in society, as well as the limits of the commodification for modern, artistic production today. It is this ongoing, creative critique of art, and economic markets, which give Clair Fontaine her unique creative stamp. (Artist website) Read Less