Elsa & Johanna

NEWS

Winners of the Grand Paris Express “Tandem” program for the creation of a permanent artwork in one of the future metro stations, in collaboration with architect Thomas Richez, under the direction of José-Manuel Gonçalvès.

Palace Odyssée, exhibition on the platforms of the Champs-Élysées Clemenceau Paris metro station, until 2025.

Winners of the competition to create two artistic posters for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Elsa Parra (born 1990) and Johanna Benaïnous (born 1991) have been collaborating since 2014 under the duo name Elsa & Johanna.

Working at the crossroads of photography, performance, and video, they have, since meeting, created visual narratives in which they are the performers. The use of autofiction, central to Elsa & Johanna’s work, allows them to stage characters freed from their own identity, questioning along the way the contemporary individual and notions of self-representation and anonymity.

Their work has been exhibited at the Salon de Montrouge (2016), at MAC/VAL, at Paris Photo, and at the Festival d’Hyères (2019). In 2020, they were finalists for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles, entered the Société Générale Contemporary Art Collection, carried out a carte blanche commission for the Palais de la Découverte, and were part of the exhibition “Staging Identity” at the Mathildenhöhe Institut in Darmstadt alongside Pipilotti Rist and Cindy Sherman.

Their photographs are part of, among others, the collections of the CNAP, the City of Paris’s Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund, and Société Générale. In 2021, the artists held their first retrospective exhibition, titled “The Plural Life of Identity,” at the Städtische Galerie in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2022, Elsa & Johanna opened the season at the MEP Studio in Paris with an exhibition devoted to their latest project, The Timeless Story of Moormerland, produced in Germany.