Acte de naissance by Clémentine Bedos

Acte de naissance was created in 2018 while Clémentine Bedos was completing their MA at the Royal Drawing School. The work forms part of Bedos’s ongoing engagement with the archive of their grandmother, the outsider artist Jeanne Durand. It is composed on one of the envelopes Durand sent from the mental asylum where she was sectioned. These envelopes often carried her drawings and became a means for her to reach out to her family from within the institution, marking both the constraints she lived under and the care she continued to express.

Onto this surface, Bedos layered a photograph of their mother during pregnancy, their birth certificate signed by their father, and one of Durand’s felt-tip flower drawings. By bringing these materials together, the work reflects on how identity is shaped, recorded and passed between generations, and gestures towards the structures that have shaped the lives of the women in Bedos’s family.

Acte de naissance was first exhibited at Christie’s in London as part of The Best of The Drawing Year 2018. Its presentation at Van Gogh House carries further resonance, as Bedos undertook a writing residency here in 2023 in which they returned to this family archive during the period leading up to their grandmother’s passing. The work’s attention to care, memory and mental health creates a quiet dialogue with the history of the house and the legacy of Van Gogh.

Product Information

Clémentine Bedos
Acte de naissance
Mixed-media
32.4 × 22.9 cm
2018

About the Artist

Clémentine Bedos is a London-based transmedia artist. Drawing from a diverse ancestry (Haitian, Gitane, Kabyle, European) and a background in law, philosophy, and fine arts, Bedos' practice explores the interrelated phenomena of mind, body, and consciousness within hegemonic systems of identity. Disrupting colonial logics, their work reorients aesthetic focus inward, reclaiming the body, its sensuality, and inner visuality as sites of emancipation and non-duality.

Recent projects include The Eternal Exchange at Nunhead Cemetery Chapel (London, 2025); Your Rage is Sacred (maa) at FormaHQ (London, 2024) and Goldsmiths Sonic Immersive Media Lab (2023); Metamorph at Eastside Projects (Birmingham, 2024), VSSL, Goldsmiths CCA, and The Bomb Factory (London, 2023); and Loving Fugitives, Runaway Images at Van Gogh House (London, 2023).

Bedos serves as Chair of the Artists Council at a-n, The Artists Information Company, contributing to artist advocacy at national and international levels through IAA Europe and IAA World. They also teach as part of the Senior Tutors team at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

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