JULIE BÉNA

Julie Béna (b. 1982 Paris, France) currently lives and works between Prague and Paris. She is a graduate of the Villa Arson, Nice, and attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In 2012–13, she was part of le Pavillon, the research laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2018, she was nominated for the Prix AWARE women art prize.

Béna grew up in a theatrical environment, where from a young age she became aware of its challenges, structural dynamics, architecture, and underlying power relations. Drawing nourishment from the interplay of performance, moving image, text, scenography, sculpture, theatre, and architecture, her work stages and distorts gendered social practices considered natural or normal, revealing how deeply embedded they are within hierarchies of power.

At the centre of her practice is the actor’s body, which holds the power to create an immediate sense of community with the audience. Through the construction of a series of characters, Béna has blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, autobiography and theatrical self-representation, while exploring themes of identity, performance, and the nature of representation.

By blending seemingly distant genres—ranging from Greek tragedy and vaudeville to Brechtian theatre, Black Light shows, cabaret, circus, strip clubs, obscure TV, and stand-up—she creates a world where high and low culture, the sacred and the absurd, coexist, and political issues emerge through allegory and exaggeration. Béna explores themes such as abortion, sexual desire, failure, and family roles, rejecting simplified or idealized narratives of womanhood and motherhood. Rooted in traditions including cabaret and surrealism, her work employs archetypal symbols and a bold aesthetic to probe the ambiguity and complexity of maternal and feminine experience, offering a profound reflection on the emotional, political, and social realities tied to “all our mothers.”