Lure
Julie Béna
Museum of Contemporary Art | Zagreb, HR
Institutional
11.06.26 - 06.09.26Solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Zagreb, HR
For more than two decades, Julie Béna has been building a world inhabited by an ever-expanding ensemble of eccentric, unsettling, and comic characters. Jesters, doppelgängers, human and nonhuman, spectral and at times monstrous figures move between films, performances, sculptures, and installations. Like a traveling theatre, her practice unfolds across diverse stages, bringing into each space an ensemble of personas whose presence provokes equal parts discomfort and pleasure. Partly rooted in the artist’s childhood spent with her mother’s touring theatre company, ideas of mobility, collective creation, and temporary belonging recur throughout her work.
For the 14th edition of Organ Vida, she presents Lure, a traveling circus spectacle anchored by a tent-like structure – a site-specific installation conceived for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. The circus serves as both motif and narrative frame, through which we encounter a series of bizarre turns, thrilling transformations, and hidden structures that shape the spectacle.
Serious about not taking things too seriously, Béna reminds us that fantasy and reality rarely exist apart. Her works embrace exaggeration, theatricality, and even bad taste in order to expose the absurdity of social norms and the mechanisms that shape our desires, traumas, and pleasures. By using humor as an artistic strategy, she opens up a space of freedom for her protagonists, where uncomfortable truths can come to light. Between applause and tears, Julie Béna reminds us that pleasure can also be the very thing that undoes us.
Julie Béna lives and works between Prague and Paris. Raised in a travelling theatre and shaped by early acting experiences, she builds her artistic reflections at the intersection of theatre, literature, and popular culture. Working across performance, sculpture, film, and installation, she appropriates everyday imaginaries and transforms them into fictional poetic, romantic, or epic narratives. Her work has been exhibited in numerous international institutions, with recent presentations including exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Pernod Ricard, and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, M Leuven in Belgium, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, and Magasin CNAC in Grenoble.