“Isabel Muñoz’s work on Japan has never been shown in France,” Chemali says. “She’s an artist who exhausts her subject and was interested in photographing the yakuzas who are people on the margin of society.”
Muñoz also photographed Japanese women practicing shibari, or bondage, against a black curtain in a studio. For submissive women, the constriction of their bodies being tied in ropes, with their own complicity, by a master, brings a cerebral and physical form of stimulation, a kind of pleasure and pain. An anguished woman stares frontally at the camera, a tear rolling down her cheek, while another image shows a body wrapped in a blue fabric like a bundle – the body itself discernible only by its contours and suspended by red ropes.
Particularly breathtaking and mysterious are the photographs that Muñoz made of Butoh dancers underwater. She also filmed performers on stage, capturing how they enter a dreamlike and agitated state, and photographed kabuki theatre – a transgender art form whereby male actors play female roles, disguising themselves through make-up and costumes.
This initial commitment to exhibit women photographers continues in the autumn, when the Centre de Photographie de Mougins will present the work of London-based photographer Natasha Caruana and of the Swedish, Zurich-based photographer Jenny Rova. Both shows will run from 29 October 2021 to 30 January 2022.