The administrative court of Paris dismissed the associations which claimed the stall of the painting of the Swiss painter Miriam Cahn exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo. His work had been described as “child pornography” by an RN deputy.
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Table Fuck Abstraction! by Miriam Cahn will remain well exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, as part of the retrospective devoted to the Swiss artist. In a press release published on March 28, the museum of contemporary art welcomed the court’s decision in its favor. The administrative court of Paris rejected, at the end of a hearing in urgent procedure of summary-freedom on March 27, “the requests made by several associations, following the controversy launched on social networks” by the RN deputy, Caroline Parmentier, who qualified the work of “child pornography”.
The justice considered in particular that the association Juristes pour l’Enfance “is unfounded to support” that the maintenance of Fuck Abstraction! in the exhibition constitutes “a serious and manifestly illegal attack on the fundamental freedom constituted by the best interests of the child”.
An artist who “denounces the horrors of war”
The administrative court of Paris notes that the table representing “the silhouette of a man with a very powerful body, without a face, who imposes fellatio on a victim of very fragile corpulence”, on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs, “bluntly” in the manner “whose sexuality is used as a weapon of war and refers to the abuses committed in the city of Butcha, Ukraine, during the Russian invasion”. However, this work “cannot be understood outside of its context and the work of artist Miriam Cahn who aims to expose the horrors of war”as duly specified in “the presentation document of the event distributed to the public”.
In response to RN deputy Caroline Parmentier who had questioned her on March 21 in the National Assembly, the Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak had already recalled that Miriam Cahn “documents and denounces the horrors of war” for 40 years. In its statement, the Palace of Tokyo “regrets the instrumentalization of this work of art and the disregard for the fundamental role that museums all over the world play in defending freedoms while respecting human rights”.
The museum states that “nearly 45,000 people” have already seen the exhibition My serial thought presented until May 14. For its part, the association Juristes pour l’Enfance indicated, in a press release published on March 28, that it takes “immediately” the state Council.
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