‘Ferocity at Home’ Magnifies Domestic Friction

In her 1987 memoir Fierce Attachments, the feminist critic Vivian Gornick magnifies the friction and folly involved in parent-child relationships. ‘I know she’s burning and I’m glad to let her burn. Why not? I’m burning, too,’ Gornick writes of her mother and the mutual destruction that can be wreaked by family. Curator Oriane Durand’s current group exhibition at Paris’s Fondation Pernod Ricard, ‘Ferocity at Home’, is titled in a nod to this sense of domestic tumult.

While few of the works on display here can equal Gornick’s fierceness, recognizable patterns of behaviour – from relatives who, even well-meaning, can be overbearing or disappointing – emerge and are repeated throughout the show. Opening the exhibition in a vitrine display are the grey and pink press-kit notes from Chantal Akerman’s 1977 film News from Home, a work that conveys a sense of adult-offspring ambivalence. Akerman’s documentary features visual vignettes of New York, over which she reads letters her mother sent her when she lived there several years prior. In one excerpt of these texts, legible in the press notes, her mother’s doting affection is threaded with evident frustration towards her living so far away. (‘Tell us when you think you’ll come back.’) 

This correspondence sits adjacent to Rosemarie Trockel’s wallpaper Mama told me not to come (2002/25), which is overlaid with two images and flanked by a lumpen brown and white ceramic, Dry Milk (Mother’s Invention) (2020). The child in the image sits on an armchair; the adult near him is blurred, resulting in an unsettling feeling that the child is isolated, maybe even neglected, despite being accompanied. Sebastian Wiegand’s nearby oil-on-canvas painting is also occupied by figures who are physically close but appear distant: Die Urban (R’s Baby) (2025) features several recumbent people in a room bestrewn with a lava lamp, a toppled wine glass and a television playing a scene from Rosemary’s Baby (1968), in which a nightgown-clad Mia Farrow clutches a knife – her new motherhood warped by the occult. A portrait of Wiegand’s own mother, La mère de l’artiste ouvrant une porte (The Artist’s Mother Opening a Door, 2025), in which she leans within a doorway with a watchful gaze, is hung in the adjacent room.

Equally autobiographical, Harilay Rabenjamina’s 16-minute video Le nez de ma mère (My Mother’s Nose, 2021) describes the sense of betrayal his mother felt when his sister got a nose job, prioritizing her desire to comply with ‘white’ beauty standards over her genetic inheritance. The video follows the artist’s mother smiling in the street, walking in nature, lying on a rock. In the voice-over, Rabenjamina notes how his own nose was mocked by his family as a ‘downward pointing arrow’. Hung high on the wall and presiding over the video is a framed digital print of the artist’s sister, Djadja (2025), with her face bandaged – the brutality of the surgery still raw. 

Tolia Astakhishvili takes autobiography a step further by integrating into her own installation, Placeholder (2025), works by her artist parents, Zurab Astakhishvili and Maka Sanadze. Two rooms are strewn with an assortment of household debris – forks, cassette tapes, a Tamagotchi, keychains, plastic bins, tea kettles, the frame of a bicycle – as well as several more telling items, including a Happy Families card game set and a decorative plate on which is inscribed MAMAN JE T’AIME (I Love You Mum). Experientially, Astakhishvili’s installation functions as an immersive family junk drawer.

While the relationships depicted in ‘Ferocity at Home’ are ultimately more malingering than they are ferocious, this perhaps augments their authenticity. After all, the elements that shape us are not always violent – instead surfacing in subtle, subconscious ways that we struggle and reckon with our entire lives.

‘Ferocity at Home’ is on view at Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, until 19 July

^{Main image: ‘Ferocity at Home’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris; photograph: Aurélien Mole}