Pauline Gudet’s Institutional Art Performance

Inside Pauline Gudet’s fictional system of recognition

Pauline Gudet is a Paris-based artist and filmmaker working across art performance, installation, and video. Her practice explores how institutional, corporate, and bureaucratic systems shape identity, visibility, and self-worth. In “Femme à la recherche d’un prix” (2026), she stages a fictional authority, the Official Authority of Recognition (OAR), which distributes value through absurd administrative rituals performed by masked figures. The system gradually absorbs the audience, turning them into both observers and participants in the act of recognition.

Through her work, Gudet examines our collective dependence on validation and the invisible structures that continually measure, confirm, and construct who we are. In the following conversation, she reflects further on the ideas and mechanisms behind the performance.

IRK: Could you introduce yourself and your practice?

Pauline Gudet: I’m a Paris-based artist and filmmaker. My work explores how the gaze of others, images, and social or institutional structures shape our sense of value and identity. I mainly work through art performance, installation and video, often using administrative, bureaucratic or corporate codes to build systems that resemble real structures of control or evaluation before becoming absurd or dysfunctional. I develop some video works with artist and AI director Amélie Lolie, using artificial intelligence to create visual glitches, artificial movements, and distorted corporate environments. I’m interested in how the need to be seen, validated or recognized shapes our behaviors and relationship to ourselves. Even when these systems seem absurd, we still want to belong to them.

IRK: The art performance “Femme à la recherche d’un prix” builds itself around the fictional institution of the “Official Authority of Recognition”. How did the idea of the OAR emerge?

Pauline Gudet: The idea came from the feeling that recognition already functions as an invisible institution. Today, our lives are constantly evaluated through images, social media, cultural institutions, work, and the gaze of others. These systems already produce symbolic value, but their rules often remain vague or arbitrary. Creating the OAR allowed me to make these mechanisms visible through protocols, forms, evaluations and procedures. I found it interesting to treat something deeply intimate — the need to be recognized — as an administrative file. I also spent years inside environments where visibility, image and validation were central, so I experienced what it means to live within a machine constantly producing recognition.

IRK: What interested you in bureaucracy and institutional language?

Pauline Gudet: Bureaucracy produces a particular form of power because it appears neutral and objective. The contrast between this appearance of logic and the violence or absurdity these systems can contain is something that interests me. Administrative language also creates emotional distance. In the performance, intimate desires — to be loved, seen or validated — are treated with the cold tone of an official protocol. I think this reflects something contemporary: we increasingly transform emotions and identities into data to manage or measure.

IRK: In your art performance, masked women execute these validation rituals. What role does anonymity play?

Pauline Gudet: The masks create uniformity. I didn’t want to represent specific individuals, but figures caught within the same system of recognition. Anonymity transforms the performers into functions rather than characters. They become almost like employees of the system, or candidates for their own validation. The masks erase singularities and create standardized figures, evoking the conformity often required within systems of recognition. But paradoxically, the mask can also make gestures and vulnerabilities even more visible.

IRK: What role does the audience play?

Pauline Gudet: The audience is essential because it activates the system. Spectators enter as observers but quickly integrate into the performance: they wait, and the performance system observes, classifies, evaluates, and applauds them. What interests me is that the audience itself produces recognition. Through its gaze and reactions, it already assigns value. The performance becomes a loop where everyone seeks recognition while simultaneously distributing it to others.

IRK: How has your personal experience shaped this understanding of gaze, applause, and self-worth?

Pauline Gudet: My personal experience and relationship with performance, image, and visibility deeply connect to these questions. For years, I evolved in environments where attention and approval occupied a central place. It gave me a strong awareness of the power — and sometimes addictive nature — of the gaze of others in the construction of the self. What interests me today is not simply criticizing these mechanisms, but acknowledging how addictive, ambiguous and human they are. I don’t position myself outside the system; I work from inside this desire for recognition.

IRK: What role do styling and artistic direction play in shaping the narrative and perception of your work?

Pauline Gudet: Styling and artistic direction are central because they directly construct the system itself. I work with a cold, controlled aesthetic inspired by administrative offices, corporate films, waiting rooms and surveillance environments. The costumes and masks create tension: the bodies may appear seductive, but the gestures remain mechanical and distant. Each performer becomes almost a copy of the other — same wigs, same masks, same visual codes. I wanted to avoid something either purely glamorous or purely critical.

IRK: Was your intention to critique these structures, or to expose how deeply we depend on them?

Pauline Gudet: I don’t think the work functions only as critique. I mainly wanted to show how dependent we are on recognition, even when we understand that the systems distributing it are arbitrary or absurd. The performance doesn’t offer a solution or clear moral position; it simply exposes a mechanism we are already all part of.

IRK: How do you navigate that tension between irony and vulnerability in your art performance?

Pauline Gudet: Irony creates distance and sometimes absurd humor. But behind this coldness, there is also something vulnerable: the desire to be seen, loved or validated. The performance exists within that tension. If it became only ironic, it would lose its humanity. If it became only intimate, it would lose its systemic and political dimension.

IRK: Do you see “Femme à la recherche” d’un prix as part of an ongoing reflection or as a standalone piece?

Pauline Gudet: I see “Femme à la recherche” d’un prix as part of a broader research around value, identity and systems of recognition. The project can evolve through different forms — performances, installations, videos, objects, protocols, and an ongoing book/archive currently in development — but they all remain connected to the same obsession: understanding why we need our value to be constantly confirmed by the outside world.

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