Julie Béna: LURE

EXHIBITION
11/06 – 06/09
Museum of Contemporary Art
Exhibition opening: 11/06 @ 8 pm
Curators: Barbara Gregov, Lovro Japundžić, Lea Vene

For more than two decades, Julie Béna has been building a world inhabited by an ever-expanding ensemble of eccentric, unsettling, and comic characters. Jesters, doppelgängers, human and nonhuman, spectral and at times monstrous figures move between films, performances, sculptures, and installations. Like a traveling theatre, her practice unfolds across diverse stages, bringing into each space an ensemble of personas whose presence provokes equal parts discomfort and pleasure. Partly rooted in the artist’s childhood spent with her mother’s touring theatre company, ideas of mobility, collective creation, and temporary belonging recur throughout her work. For Organ Vida, she presents a traveling circus spectacle anchored by a tent-like structure - a site-specific installation conceived for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. The circus serves as both motif and narrative frame, through which we encounter a series of bizarre turns, thrilling transformations, and hidden structures that shape the spectacle.

It features an all-star lineup: signature characters from different phases of the artist’s career. From Rose Pantoponne to Strakati and Dirty Shirley, Béna develops autobiographical figures that extend beyond the artist herself through exaggeration, parody, and theatrical distortion. Costume, bodily posture, and gesture become the primary tools that shape their performance. As the artist herself says, a character usually begins with shoes, a silhouette, a body that steps into the role before language can catch up. Laughter, screams, animal sounds, heightened affect, and gesticulation are forms of nonverbal communication she uses to enter a space of magic and absurdity, freed from the burden of semantics. Her characters are cunning, scheming provocateurs who, by feigning empathy, try to manipulate the situation. Their perversity and inconsistency thus come to the fore, along with power relations shaped by social expectations and negotiation. The porous boundary between reality and fiction is further blurred by the involvement of the artist’s own family in her work. In the films presented, Strakati and Dirty Shirley, family members take part in a grotesque choreography of shifting roles, moods, and masks. Who becomes whom? Who possesses whom? Who performs for whom?

Julie Béna’s fantastical worlds often let you see the workings behind the scenes. Rather than promising total illusion, they draw attention to the underlying structures - the mechanics of theatre and stagecraft. Skeletal figures, modular sets, and props reveal the spectacle as something constructed. Throughout the installation we encounter the artist’s signature black metal sculptures, spatial pieces, and meticulously executed illusionistic drawings. Her affinity for simple tools that produce magical effects surfaces in music boxes and theatrical automata, set in motion by light, sound, and movement. The space of play extends into the museum’s hidden corners, where we encounter black jesters - anonymous provocateurs who are a recurring motif in the artist’s films and installations.

Serious about not taking things too seriously, Béna reminds us that fantasy and reality rarely exist apart. Her works embrace exaggeration, theatricality, and even bad taste in order to expose the absurdity of social norms and the mechanisms that shape our desires, traumas, and pleasures. By using humor as an artistic strategy, she opens up a space of freedom for her protagonists, where uncomfortable truths can come to light. Between applause and tears, Julie Béna reminds us that pleasure can also be the very thing that undoes us.

If you don’t say ‘thank you,’ they don’t know when to clap.
Lady Bunny

Julie Béna lives and works between Prague and Paris. Heir to a childhood spent in a traveling theater and an adolescence as an actress, Julie Béna’s reflections are nourished and inspired by theater and literature as well as popular culture. Through a work that mixes performance, sculpture, cinema and installation, Julie Béna summons imagery and everyday concerns that she makes her own through stagings, transforming them into subjects of fictions that are sometimes poetic, romantic or epic. Béna’s work has been presented at Jester, Genk; Fused, San Francisco; Spielzeug, NYC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Bozar, Brussels; RCA, London; National Gallery, Prague; C arte C, Madrid. She has had solo exhibitions at Magasin CNAC, Grenoble; PLATO, Ostrava; Villa Arson, Nice; Kunstraum, London, UK; Kunstverein Bielefeld, DE; Jeu de Paume, Paris, Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico. She has recently performed at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; M Leuven; ICA London, Independent, Brussels; Fondation Pernod Ricard and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.