Julie Béna

The work of French artist Julie Béna (b. 1982) is rooted in her early experience with theatre, her sustained interest in the representation of women’s roles in society, and the deconstruction of entrenched gender stereotypes. Her multidisciplinary practice, encompassing performance, video, installation, and sculpture, develops a distinctive visual language in which theatricality intertwines with allegory, poetic irony, and subtly unsettling elements of fictional worlds.

Drawing on traditions such as cabaret, commedia dell’arte, pantomime, and surrealism, Béna reconfigures these references for a contemporary context. Through staged situations, characters, and alter egos, she explores the ways in which gender roles and power structures are constructed, internalized, and repeatedly performed.

Her works operate at the intersection of personal experience and collective imagination and frequently engage in dialogue with icons of popular culture (for example, in the recent project Dirty Shirley), which function as condensed symbols of social expectations and projections. Béna creates works that are at once critical and playful, introspective and performative.

Julie Béna lives and works between Prague and Paris. She studied at Villa Arson in Nice and was a resident researcher at Le Pavillon, the research laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In 2018, she was nominated for the Prix AWARE for women artists. Her works are held in numerous significant public and private collections, including CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Centre national des arts plastiques, FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, FRAC Bretagne, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, Prague City Gallery, Fonds d’art contemporain – Paris Collection, and the Fiorucci Arts Trust.