All You Can Eat

Karine Giboulo creates miniature worlds in which she compresses a childlike but terrifying vision of contemporary reality. Enclosed in transparent plastic spheres or in sky-blue plinths, her “life bubbles,” as she calls them, present miniaturized pseudo-naïve visions of compelling and serious subjects: consumption, globalization, nationalism, the media, the environment, food, artificiality and waste. Giboulo created All You Can Eat after a trip to China, where she visited the dormitory-factories of Shenzhen. Set ingeniously inside three plinths and visible from a number of angles, her miniature scenes portray, playfully but with crystal clarity, the terrifying mechanics of the trade that governs the global food chain. Little figures of painted polymer clay represent Chinese workers, pigs destined for the slaughterhouse, greedy American consumers, all playing their parts and living their lives of hope, ignorance and tragedy. Believing, to paraphrase Léon Bloy, that hell is more terrifying seen though the eye of a needle than through vast embrasures, Giboulo opens tiny windows onto the implacable and monstrous mechanism of world trade.