EVENT: HEEL TURN (SEPTEMBER 24–DECEMBER 13 2025, PARIS)
Heel Turn
Curated by Camille Martin
Featuring works by Réda Boussella, Zoé Chataignon, and Yannis Mohand Briki
24 September to 13 December 2025
La Maison pop
9bis rue Dombasle 93100 Montreuil, France
La Maison pop (Montreuil) opens its 2025–26 season with Heel Turn, an exhibition curated by Camille Martin that brings together works by Réda Boussella, Zoé Chataignon, and Yannis Mohand Briki. The show runs from 24 September to 13 December 2025, with a vernissage on Tuesday 23 September (18:00–21:00) and a closing event on Friday 12 December (from 20:00).
Borrowed from the vocabulary of professional wrestling, the title refers to the moment when a hero turns “heel”, the sudden shift to the dark side. For Roland Barthes, this figure embodied “le salaud parfait”: a character who never disappoints precisely because they embody the role assigned to them. Heel Turn asks what happens when artists reject such fixed expectations, refusing to play the parts assigned by audiences, institutions, or even their own self-image.
The exhibition explores these tensions through autofictional imaginaries where monstrous and malevolent figures disrupt social and identity-based assignments. The works of Boussella, Chataignon, and Briki re-stage the unstable line between good and evil, sometimes with tenderness, sometimes with fury, on what the curatorial text calls “the ring of the art world.”