Tessa Mars’ practice is situated within an exploration of the relationship between memory, narrative, and spirituality. Imbued with the historical and affective inheritances of the Haitian Revolution, her work explores the ways that these continue to shape her relationship to the land, but also to notions of survival, adaptability, struggle, and creation. She is also invested in the way that myths, beliefs, and legends structure our relationship to the world— both visible and invisible— and shape forms of belonging. The artist draws on Haitian history as much as her own personal experience in order to imagine modes of repair, transformation, and connection.
For La Mue (Shedding) the artist presents an installation composed of suspended cut-metal sculptures, as well as a sound work. The project emerges from her return to Haiti after a number of years abroad. This return, which at first felt like a reunion, was soon tainted by change: a once-familiar country made foreign, troubled by extreme gang violence, political paralysis, and deep-set poverty. Her works are constructed out of this experience of disadjustment, where attachment, loss, and the necessity to re-learn how to inhabit a place coexist.
Here, cut-metal, a traditional Haitian technique, is introduced into the artist’s practice for the first time. Produced in collaboration with craftspeople, these suspended forms extend an imaginary that dates back to the artist’s childhood, shaped, notably, by the wood sculptures and works in cut-metal that her maternal grandmother sold in her shop. These objects also adorned Tessa Mars’ family home. In the evenings, her grandmother would recount Haitian stories and legends, populated by fantastical creatures, danger, and metamorphoses. The shadows thrown by these sculptures, both protective and unsettling, have continued to nourish the imagination of the artist since childhood.
Inside the gallery, these figures inhabit the installation. They are both heroic and vulnerable, seemingly engaged in a process of permanent transformation. Suspended between various states, they show bodies in the process of becoming, traversed by human, animal and spiritual presences. Among them, blazing silhouettes extend a recurring motif within the artist’s practice, where fire evokes both the violence of history— echoing the uprisings of the Haitian Revolution— and the possibility of reinvention. The figure of the dog navigates the installation, protectors watching over the process of transformation. The grass snake, associated with the imaginary of wisdom and knowledge, traces the movement of transforming with its process of shedding that gives the exhibition its title.
A lullaby that her mother would sing to her resonates through the gallery and accompanies the installation. This intimate voice acts as a thread, connecting memory, protection and transmission. It situates the ensemble in a sensitive temporality, where the past brushes up against the present. The exhibition immerses us in this intermediary moment, where an ancient form is undone, before the new is yet stabilised.
Biography of the artist:
Tessa Mars is a Haitian visual artist whose work explores questions of gender, landscape, migration, and spirituality in relation to Haiti’s history. She graduated from the University of Rennes 2 (2006) and completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2020–2022). She lives and works in Port-au-Prince.
Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Casa del Lago (Mexico City, 2024), Maison Dufort (Port-au-Prince, 2019), the French Institute in Port-au-Prince (2016), and Alice Yard (Port of Spain, 2015).
She has participated in group exhibitions, including at MAC Panama (Panama City, 2026), Ocean Space (Venice, 2025) as part of the TBA21–Academy program, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de San Juan (2025), the Denver Art Museum (2022), the South London Gallery (2022), Framer Framed (Amsterdam, 2022), as well as BRIC Arts (Brooklyn, 2018), the Power Plant Gallery at Duke University (Durham, 2018), and the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien (Port-au-Prince, 2014).
Mars also participated in the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), the 3rd Toronto Biennial of Art (2024), and Prospect.6 in New Orleans (2024). She was part of the inaugural Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).
La Mue is Tessa Mars’ first solo exhibition in France.