Villa du Parc

For her first exhibition in France at the Villa du Parc, Flo Kasearu undertakes an in-situ investigation based on the building’s archives. She draws inspiration from the multiple lives of this bourgeois villa built in 1865: from 1930 onwards, the building served as a district court, a police station, a tax office, and also as a residence for families. From these institutional and domestic layers, she imagines a fiction in which the gaze of a solitary child living there in the 1950s becomes the thread of a narrative woven between memory, play, and power. What happens when childhood games infiltrate institutional affairs? When the courthouse becomes a playground? When judges play ping-pong, police officers imagine themselves as cartoon characters, and children become the guardians of order? A kind of delightful, absurd, yet often critical confusion takes place. Don’t Step on the Grass explores the relationships between the public and private spheres. Through role-playing, personal anecdotes, and the playful reappropriation of everyday objects, the Estonian artist questions our relationship to authority figures, overturns roles, and unsettles established hierarchies. Flo Kasearu Flo Kasearu lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia, at the Flo Kasearu House Museum, where she has been director since 2013. The nature of her work is both seasonal and exploratory. Each project begins as an open-ended game. She attaches as much importance to irony as to aesthetics. Her practice explores the boundaries between private and public space, vertical and horizontal relationships, the monumental and the unstable, the individual and the collaborative. She has presented her work in several solo exhibitions, including Host, Stanley Picker Gallery, and Parasites (with Elīna Vītola), Dorich House Museum, 2023; Flo’s Retrospective, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, 2022; Cut Out of Life, Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia, 2021. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as The New Subject. Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2024; Power. Baton from Kütiorg to Kadriorg, Kadriorg Art Museum, Tallinn, 2023; and Between Objects, HAM, Helsinki, Finland, 2022. [LINK text='flokasearu.eu' href='https://www.flokasearu.eu/']