My first encounter with Julie Béna’s performance (together with Gaël Sall) was at Prague’s Fotograf Gallery in 2016. Julie dressed as a sailor discussing the dystopic edges of contemporaneity was fully present, theatrical. The show cut into time and space with both ease and a strong sense of urgency. I thought it was radically different from what was going on in Czech performance back then. It left me thinking about what kind of place might Bena’s multidisciplinary work inhabit in the local scene, which was at that point still mostly floating on neoconceptual tides. Ten years and a few paradigm shifts later, Béna has achieved an outstanding position not only as a French artist based in Prague, but also within the most competitive international realms. She currently co-leads the performance studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, has presented solo shows in major art institutions across Europe, the US and beyond, and has created immersive films, installations, performances and publications with perhaps even more urgency, unmistakable aesthetics and burning content than what she gave us a taste of at Fotograf.
During the performance, her husband Michal was feeding their newborn babygirl in the back room of the gallery. Both the Husband and the Daughter, as well as Béna’s Mother, eventually became characters in her films. In Strakati (2022), they partly embody themselves, boldly sharing their intimate realities, and partly they are disguised into dramatic alter-egos stemming from Béna’s wildest or perhaps darkest fantasies. In Dirty Shirley (2025), the family inhabits territories of somewhat twisted popular TV shows as well as desert landscapes with just as much raw, existential feeling as in the staged Strakati. In both of these signature films, the smile of the lead character (played by Béna herself) is so spastic that it makes you grind your teeth. The sexual tension dances on the edge of unleashed passion and the ugly truth. The fairy tale turns to horror and back, the grotesque is so awkward that it grabs you by the shoulder even when you are hiding in your closet. Throughout her work, Béna looks into what could be called sub-reality, revealing the parts of ourselves beneath what is presentable or publicly accepted, parts that we are both disgusted by and obsessed with, so afraid to be revealed and so impossible to get rid of.
Besides Julie Béna herself and her family members, a pleiad of other characters reappears in her storytelling. It might be Miss None and Mister Peanut, a voiced wig and a hundred years old mascot of and American peanut selling company, both defined rather through what they are not, then what they actually are. Or Pantopon Rose, who became Béna’s long-term alter ego, an autobiographical note, a fictive yet real character. Another important being is the Jester, inhabiting an animated film trilogy (Anna and the Jester in Window of Opportunity, 2019; The Jester and Death, 2020; Le Jester Dans La Vellée, 2023). The Jester is yet another aspect of Julie Béna, an avatar trapped in sterile glass architecture, meeting dead rebels at a neo-gothic cemetery in London or encountering the Sisyphus of insects, the dung beetle, rolling his ball of excrement, as well as the mycelium, a tree and a blob, in a tale of fluidity, contamination and collaboration.
Animality, phantasmic realms that permeate our realities, unequal power structures, primal sexual force, or the strange roles we play when the bedroom or bathroom doors close are themes intersecting not only Béna’s films, but also her highly stylized objects, drawings and installations that often position the moving image works within multilayered narratives. The carriage, the hobby horse, the pierrot, the burning tree, the fishbone, the shoe. Hardly any tale could be told without at least some of those elements. Béna’s major solo exhibitions, such as Parodie (Magazine CNAC, Grenoble, 2025-2026), or Fantasy (PLATO Ostrava, 2024) tell lush, excessive stories – sometimes so visceral that the juices seem to uncontrollably exit the spectators’ mouths – through large-scale metal sculptures, appearing as if ink-drawn into three-dimensional space, through circus-like massive cutouts, chandeliers and carousels, as well as through tiny puppets and fragile hand-sawn objects capturing fleeting moments – the insect, the eyes, the candlelight. The whole comes together as more than a sum of its parts, as a circus maximus of life, a battlefield, a spectacle, a ray of light shining through the spider web.
Julie Béna is certainly a master of staging. Not only are her exhibitions and performances highly choreographed and consciously exploring the various possibilities of contemporary theatricality. There is often a second layer of revealing the stage itself, the setup, whether in a film or in the exhibition room as a whole. The viewers are invited not only as voyeurs, but also drawn in – and onto stage – as accomplices, co-sufferrers, co-players. They may witness a story that actually could be theirs. They may choose whether they will dig in someone else’s dirt, or in their own. Or, perhaps, both at once.
I don’t believe in magic.
But I believe in love.
Love and war and violence.
And love.
(Excerpt from Strakati)
Source:
Fantasy. UK, Londýn. Montez Press, 2025
