For its first collaboration with the Chapelle Saint‑Louis at the Pitié‑Salpêtrière hospital, Photo Days invites Julie Balagué to present her new series Anatomie de l’invisible. The artist explores the phenomenon of pregnancy denial, a subject rarely addressed outside the news . Here she offers a social, political, and sensitive reading a mirror held up to how women’s bodies are treated in our society.
Over seven years, Julie Balagué conducted an in‑depth inquiry with women who experienced this extreme physiological condition, often linked to past violence or internalized injunctions. She gathers their words, confronts them with images, and, through photography, seeks to render perceptible what cannot be seen.
Working at the threshold between documentary and material experimentation, she questions the photographic medium itself: how to represent what eludes visibility? How to materialize a buried experience? Her images combined with texts and mobile exhibition devices invite to shift our gaze, a movement both physical and mental.
Presented at the heart of the historic chapel of the Pitié‑Salpêtrière, this work resonates with the memory of the site. Founded under Louis XIV, the Salpêtrière was long an institution for the confinement of poor, ill, or “hysterical” women. The church was also the stage for a silent history of the control of women’s bodies.
By installing Anatomy of the Invisible here, Photo Days chooses to open this space to words, to listening, and to art. It is a powerful gesture linking memory and contemporary creation, in a place where women once invisible today reclaim their full place.
About the Chapelle Saint‑Louis of the Pitié‑Salpêtrière Hospital
Installed in the Chapelle Saint‑Louis at the heart of the Pitié‑Salpêtrière hospital (AP‑HP), the exhibition benefits from a cultural heritage setting still little known to the general public. Built under King Louis XIV first by the architect Louis Le Vau, then by Libéral Bruant the church is notable for its Greek‑cross plan and for a central octagonal dome, 60 meters high, above the choir.
The exhibition is supported by CulturFoundry, an association of art lovers and enthusiasts that promotes living creation.
Chapelle Saint‑Louis de la Pitié‑Salpêtrière (Paris 13th)
Julie Balagué – Anatomy of the Invisible
November 6–December 12
Chapelle Saint-Louis de l’Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière
83 boulevard de l’Hôpital · Paris 13th
free entry, daily 9:30am–6pm
