In Cry me a river (2024) by Mégane Brauer, suburban pre-teens take advantage of a rainy summer to learn to swim. However, when the bailiffs burst in to take away their world, emptiness sets in. For the parents, shame and resourcefulness are the daily lot of a precarious life. For the narrator, the emotions she discovers will irrevocably taint her childhood memories.

The story is at the heart of a cycle of exhibitions that the artist initiated in 2023 at the Musée Transitoire in Paris, and that continues this autumn with a second part, ‘Les rois du monde’, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille, the city where the artist lives and works. Brauer took her first steps there in 2020, with a residency at Triangle-Astérides, followed by an exhibition at La Rose, an art space in the northern district, in 2021. She joined the Air de Paris gallery in 2022, and has since exhibited in venues across France, including Magasins Généraux in Pantin and the Fondation Fiminco in Romainville.

Brauer moves back and forth between an often autofictional style of writing and the assembly of discount objects. The artist expresses herself through a situated language that uses the codes and grammar of those who live on the edge. To draw attention to a reality that is often ignored or denigrated, she mobilizes the tricks of seduction and sensation. Among her emblematic pieces are glittery Lidl spaghetti and embroidery on household cloths. In Mégane Brauer, the art world has found a figure who combines words, objects, and lots of rhinestones in the fight against the erasure of the working classes.