Exhibitions
Performances
Screenings

Presented as

Galleries
Festivals
Public commissions

Contexts

Year

2005–present

Marie-Lou Desmeules, also known as LouRie, has presented her work internationally through exhibitions, screenings, performances, commissions, and public installations.

Her projects have appeared in contexts ranging from contemporary art spaces and festivals to commissioned public works and moving-image platforms. Across these presentations, her practice has remained focused on transformation, staged identity, portraiture, and the unstable boundary between image and belief.

Exhibitions

Commissioned for the Spanish HBO Max series Queer You Are, I Am Everyone Anyone No One extends Marie-Lou Desmeules’ living sculpture practice into a televised context. Through paint, costume, gesture, and staging, human subjects are transformed into figures drawn from celebrity culture, history, politics, and contemporary archetypes. Recognition becomes unstable: the face remains visible, while identity begins to dissolve. The project reflects Desmeules’ ongoing exploration of transformation, portraiture, and the fragile boundary between person, image, and projection.

2021
I AM EVERYONE ANYONE NO ONE

Presented at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, Clone Corrupt brought together the work of Marie-Lou Desmeules and Isham. The installation explored duplication, disguise, and the instability of identity through two distinct artistic approaches. Desmeules’ contribution extended her research into transformation and staged persona, placing the body between portrait, performance, and constructed image. Together, the works created a dialogue around likeness, fragmentation, and the uneasy space between self and copy.

2019

CLONE CORRUPT

Presented at Trafo Art Center in Szczecin, Poland, Who Are You? explored identity as something unstable, constructed, and performed. Through transformation, staging, and portraiture, Marie-Lou Desmeules questioned the idea of a fixed self. The work invited viewers to confront recognition as a fragile process: a face can be seen, altered, multiplied, or erased, while identity remains in motion. The project reflects Desmeules’ ongoing interest in the body as image, and in the ways appearance shapes how we read, project, and believe in a person.

2015

WHO ARE YOU?

Presented in Berlin, Germany, Unshot Film Stills features photographs by Amin Akhtar, created in collaboration with the art collective Katz & Steve, founded by Paula Bogati and Marie-Lou Desmeules in 2006. The project approaches cinema through images of films that do not exist. Each still suggests a scene, a character, or a fragment of narrative, leaving the viewer to complete the story. Through staged photography and fictional cinematic language, Unshot Film Stills explores memory, projection, and the emotional charge of images detached from any complete film.

2019

UNSHOT FILM STILLS

Presented at Studio9 in Istanbul, Turkey, Ephemeral Metamorphosis was a live performance exploring transformation, concealment, and the body as temporary sculpture. Set within a black cube structure, the work created a space between exposure and disappearance. The performer’s body became both hidden and displayed, transformed through gesture, material, and duration.

The project reflects Marie-Lou Desmeules’ early investigation into the fragile boundary between body, image, and sculptural form — a transformation made to exist only briefly before vanishing.

2011

EPHEMERAL METAMORPHOSIS

Presented at Baraka in Bucharest, Romania, Monster Unveiled was a live transformation performance by Marie-Lou Desmeules. Over the course of two hours, Desmeules guided a young woman through a staged metamorphosis, using makeup, costume, gesture, and ritualized action to alter the body’s presence before an audience. Set on a candlelit wooden stage, with music by Silent Strike, the performance unfolded between intimacy and spectacle. The work explored transformation not as disguise, but as revelation: a temporary figure emerging through the process of being constructed. Photos by Adi Bulboacă.

2015

MONSTER UNVEILED

Presented at Université Laval in Québec, Canada, in partnership with the Faculty of Philosophy, Inhabiting the Grotesque was a performance by Marie-Lou Desmeules exploring the body as a site of transformation, projection, and philosophical unease. Through a live process of pictorial transformation, the performer’s body was altered into a grotesque figure before the audience. The work examined the experience of inhabiting a body under scrutiny — one that becomes unfamiliar, excessive, and no longer fully one’s own. The project brought together performance, painting, and philosophy to question how the body is seen, interpreted, and transformed by the gaze of others.