Here, Valérie Belin sets out to make portraits of celluloid mannequins. What initially attracted the artist was the hyperrealist appearance of these mannequins which are cast from bodies, and can therefore already be considered as kinds of photographs (in three dimensions) of living female models. Belin’s photographs highlight this question of reality and illusion: are these models, women or objects? This fundamental ambiguity of “being” in Belin’s photographs opens onto a wider question regarding the nature of life itself: what is life today, and how is it informed by uncertainty, metamorphosis and the forces of destruction?