Julie Béna

The work of French artist Julie Béna (1982) merges her early experience in the theatre with a sustained engagement with the representation of women in society and the deconstruction of entrenched gender stereotypes. Her multidisciplinary practice – spanning performance, video, text, scenography, and sculpture – cultivates a distinctive visual language in which theatricality intersects with allegory, poetic irony, and the subtly disrupted logic of fictional worlds.

Drawing on the traditions of cabaret, commedia dell’arte, pantomime, and surrealism, Béna reinterprets these modes for contemporary contexts to reveal how gender roles, social norms, and power structures are staged, internalised, and continually replayed. Through a constellation of characters and alter egos, she blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, mask and body, creating space for ambivalent, often disquieting yet ultimately liberating forms of self-presentation.

Julie Béna lives and works between Prague and Paris. She studied at Villa Arson in Nice and later joined the research laboratory Le Pavillon at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In 2018 she was nominated for the Prix AWARE for women artists. Her work is held in several major public and private collections, including CAPC Bordeaux, Cnap, FRAC MÉCA Nouvelle-Aquitaine, FRAC Bretagne, FRAC Normandie, and the Fiorucci Arts Trust.