For me, it's a ‘natural’ gesture to rip bodies apart, cut them up... I always feel that my identity as a woman and as an artist is divided, disintegrated, fragmented, and never linear, always multifaceted...always pictures of parts of bodies, fragments and closeups… I always perceive the body in fragments.
(Annette Messager quoted in Sheryl Conkelton, Carol S. Eliel, Annette Messager, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1995)

Image credit: Mes vœux, 1989 [My Vows], Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © the artist