Valérie Mréjen
Manufrance 2005
Courtesy the aritst and galerie cent8-serge le borgne, Paris © Valérie Mréjen
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Mréjen is as a writer, filmmaker, photographer and artist. Running throughout her work is an interest in the banal or everyday. In Manufrance (2005) she imagines a day in the life of a 1970s housewife, pieced together from a series of static shots, filmed from copies of the French mail order catalogue Manufrance. On the soundtrack, a woman's voice monotonously describes the activities we see. The photographs hail from a decade when women’s liberation was prominent in the public consciousness, and Mréjen presents an image of a bored, alienated woman who has become almost a part of the furniture. Giving voice to a set of sanitised images, Manufrance invites the viewer to look beyond the gloss of the catalogue's pages to an underlying tension and sense of unease.