Julie Béna at Villa Arson, Nice, France
Miles, a solo exhibition by FFA artist and studio supervisor Julie Béna at Villa Arson in Nice, France, presents a striking and poetic intervention into the codes of theatricality, sculpture, and narrative structure. Curated by Marie de Brugerolle, the exhibition was conceived specifically for the Galerie carrée. Known for her genre-defying practice that blurs boundaries between performance, film, object, and text, Béna constructs a world that is at once ironic, tragic, and surreal. At the heart of Miles lies a play with oxymoron and contradiction. The exhibition acts like a “light opera” – open, layered, and emotionally sharp. Visitors enter a scenographic landscape populated by life-sized silhouettes of horses, a dead tree, a cart, artificial rocks, and fiery flowers, evoking both cinematic memory and stage illusion.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is The Aspirants, a new group of twelve steel sculptures produced in Prague. Their jagged black forms contrast with the geometric clarity of the gallery's ceiling grid, casting fragmented shadows and creating a constellation of sculptural presences that resist containment within the modernist white cube. These elements – appearing as remnants of a stylized Western or references to Westworld – evoke a decaying imaginary of the West: a space of both conquest and collapse, of borders imposed and dissolved. Béna’s spatial dramaturgy, with its ambiguity and wit, invites viewers to move through a fragmented fiction where theatrical illusion and sculptural presence are held in tension.
The exhibition was internationally recognized and named one of the five most remarkable exhibitions in Europe by Italian magazine ZOE, affirming its critical resonance and artistic significance.
More info:
https://villa-arson.fr/programmation/expositions/julie-bena-miles/
https://www.zoemagazine.net/176978-5-unmissable-exhibitions-in-europe/
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| Short URL | https://www.favu.vut.cz/en/rad/awards-recognition/f91716/d289123 |
Responsibility: doc. MgA. Filip Cenek