Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann exhbition: Le cœur et les poumons

Emanuela Campoli and Galerie Allen are pleased to announce Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann’s solo exhibition Le coeur et les poumons. Each space will host a distinct part of the exhibition: Poumons at Galerie Allen, Cœur at Emanuela Campoli. The two vital, interdependent organs evoke two strands of Badaut-Haussman’s ongoing research: her iconographic investigation on the tobacco industry and the heart as a culturally loaded symbol of love and intimacy. Pursuing her research on feminist architecture, the exhibition addresses the tension between an interior, domestic realm and a political, visible space that also echoes in the spectator’s flâneries between both venues.

At Emanuela Campoli, Badaut Haussmann turns to the heart - a site of affection and care, but also a contested space where emotional labour, desire and power are at stake. The works unfold continuously throughout the different rooms of the gallery with some series installed at a recurring pace, as if their nature could be revealed through their own variations. In her almost surgical actions, Badaut Haussmann dissects, subtracts but also inserts elements, repairing and diverting the function of existing iconography, films and objects.

The association between the heart and the home is read by Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann through the lens of feminist spatial theory. Space reflects and reinforces gender roles in a system of divides, out of which the public and the private is the most stubborn one. One of the series that iterates throughout the space is Maisons Françaises, une collection (2012–ongoing), which opens the exhibition with a full-blown image of a luxury handbag and its calculatedly spilled interior. Stripped of its original context - the interior decoration and lifestyle magazine of the same name - the image reveals itself as a staging ground of aspirational and prescriptive femininity. Randomly arranged glasses with dubious colorless liquids add an element of tension and distrust into what might otherwise appear to be a safe, domestic environment.

After climbing the stairs once captured by the iconic documentarian of Parisian interiors, Eugène Atget, visitors enter the gallery’s library, where her installation centers on jewellery, a marketed symbol of desirability and status, but also a reward or measure of a women’s worth. In her Cosmetiques blanches (2025), jewellery is veiled in see-through sleeves, while in Cat Lady (2025), also from Maisons Françaises, they are worn lustfully on a cat. A powerful symbol that bridges ancient reverence with viral culture, the cat is also used to caricature single, liberal women who are allegedly unhappy or childless.

A series of curtains bridge one room to the other in act of uninterrupted writing. Much like Clarice Lispector’s spiraling narrative of The Passion According to G.H., where the phrases stem from, language is unstable and constantly unraveling. This time, her Maisons Françaises backdrops surround paravent Domestique Gore (2025), a double-textured structure in aluminum and marbled paint that supports a set of images from films highlighting quiet submissiveness in everyday life and their horror overtones. In her work, cinema’s temporal elasticity allows her to reshape narratives, providing also a lens through which the spatial dynamics that she works with are made visible.

The works in the last room further stress the idea of domestic life as self-contained and inert in appearance, present in the gas cylinder sitting on a red carpet and her raw photographs of faded flowers. Based on Marguerite Duras’ film Baxter, Vera Baxter - in which a woman finds herself trapped by her marriage and isolated in an elegant modernist villa by the sea - this group of works capture a sense of latent pressure, where the home becomes both a site of passive comfort and space of entrapment masked by elegance.


At Galerie Allen, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann turns to the lungs, not only as organs of breath and survival, but also as spaces of rhythm, exchange, and fragility. A central element is The Tobacco Files (2022–ongoing), a visual archive composed of thousands of images sourced from advertisements, political campaigns, cinema, blog, social network and anti-smoking materials. This encyclopaedic collection is intuitively organised, grouped and presented on industrial shelving, available for the public to consult. It serves as a cultural investigation of how tobacco circulates through visual and ideological histories, embodying seduction, resistance, and control.



Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann (b. 1980) is based in Paris. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts, Paris-Cergy, holds a master from Université de Paris 8, Vincennes-St Denis and is currently doing a practice Phd at SACRe/PSL aux Beaux-Arts de Paris. Badaut Haussmann’s artistic practice is based on the development of a project-based method. Her research is part of an intersectional feminist approach that crosses psychology and constructed environments, focusing on forms of emancipation and empowerment as much as on structures of conditioning and alienation. She uses sculpture, installation, video, sound, and text, often viewing the exhibition space itself as her primary medium, ensuring her approach is always responsive to the context. Drawing on her knowledge of cinema, literature, architecture, and design, she explores these disciplines as platforms for social and political commentary.



Represented by Galerie Allen in Paris, Emanuela Campoli in Paris and Milan, Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, she was awarded the 2017 AWARE Prize and has had residencies at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, and the Secession in Vienna. Badaut Haussmann co-founded *DUUU Radio and has taught at Université Paris Diderot and The New School - Parsons Paris. Her notable projects include the Tobacco Files, the social sculpture Pav.Lov and studies on feminist architecture. Her work is exhibited internationally, contributing to contemporary dialogues on culture and society.