August 22, 2026 | Art & Culture
AMUSEMENT as METHOD
words Rajesh Punj
For the Luxembourg Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Aline Bouvy presents La Merde, moving between film, sculpture and installation. On view at the Arsenale’s Sale d’Armi until 22 November 2026, the exhibition explores the body, identity and the spaces we inhabit. In conversation with Rajesh Punj, Bouvy reflects on material, failure and colour.
“The body is the inscribed surface of events,” argued French historian Michel Foucault, a proposition that resonates with particular force in the work of Brussels-based artist Aline Bouvy, where the body is neither fixed nor resolved but continuously shaped by encounter, memory and cultural inscription. Bouvy observes that “the body is never neutral, it carries everything,” articulating a position that moves away from representation towards something more unstable: the body as site, as process; something both emotional and unmanageable. A vessel capable of carrying a multitude of characteristics, it is equally prone to self-doubt. In that sense, her work unfolds less as depiction than as exposure—of systems, habits, idiosyncrasies and the invisible structures that determine how we see and sense the world.
If the body is unstable, slipping, so too is the space that contains it. As Irish-American art critic and academic Brian O’Doherty insisted, “there is no such thing as a neutral space,” a statement that dismantles the long-held fiction of the white cube as an entirely passive, unproblematic arena. In Bouvy’s practice, the exhibition space is not simply activated by art; it becomes a stage, with her artworks appearing as mismatched props and the atmosphere taking on something of an amusement park. Less static, it becomes a site of rehearsal, spectacle and encounter. Conjuring Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman’s observation that “the world is a stage,” Bouvy turns metaphor into method. The exhibition operates as a dramaturgical field, where objects are positioned, bodies are implied or performed, and the spectator is inevitably implicated.
Bouvy’s installations function like scenes in which sculpture takes on the logic of theatre: less autonomous object than accessory, less resolved form than participant in a wider choreography. In such a context, her work recalls Polish modernist painter Tadeusz Kantor’s assertion that “the object is an actor,” imbued with a presence that exceeds its material condition. Yet Bouvy complicates this further: her objects are not only actors but residues—traces of action, use and transformation. They hover between action and symbols of unease, humour and hurt, inhabiting what might be described as a threshold condition.
This is also where the work engages most directly with the body’s limits, its excesses, its abjections and its refusals. Here, the ideas of Bulgarian-French literary critic Julia Kristeva are unavoidable: “the abject… disturbs identity, system, order.” Bouvy’s practice does not simply illustrate this disturbance; it stages it, often through materials and gestures that provoke discomfort precisely because they remain so close to lived experience. And yet this is never without a certain playfulness and stupidity. There is an unmistakable current of amusement and spectacle running through the work, aligning it, however obliquely, with the logic of entertainment.
BETWEEN PLACES AND IDENTITIES
RP: I imagine you’re in Venice…
AB: Yes, I’m in Venice. I tried to find a place that was a little bit quiet. I’m on my phone as well; I need to keep the battery going on my computer.
RP: Thank you for making the time. It’s been a little difficult to organise.
AB: Of course. We have some technical issues at the moment, so it’s okay. When you show a film, you always think you just push play and everything is going to work, and of course, it doesn’t.
RP: Just to situate things clearly, particularly in the context of the Biennale, which still insists on a national structure of representation, am I right in understanding that you were born in Belgium but are representing Luxembourg? And how do you yourself navigate that positioning?
AB: I was born in Belgium, but I was raised in Luxembourg. I took Luxembourgish nationality when I was about eighteen. And I live between Luxembourg and Belgium because my studio is in Brussels. It’s a very small country; it would be a little bit boring to live and work only in Luxembourg. So, very often I’m associated with Belgian art because I’m more related to Belgium through my work. But my nationality is Luxembourgish. And of course, I’ve done exhibitions in Luxembourg as well, so between the two, it can be a little confusing.
RP: It’s interesting, and perhaps increasingly complicated, because the idea of nationality feels both structurally imposed and conceptually unstable at the same time. We are all, as you say, living in relatively small and interconnected European contexts, and yet these distinctions persist. You mentioned your Spanish background as well, so there is already a layering of identity there.
AB: Yes, my mother is Spanish. She came to Belgium in the 1960s. I grew up with many languages. It’s a bit like navigating different cultures; it’s very interesting.
RP: I was speaking recently with another Belgian artist, Koen Vanmechelen, about Venice and about the possibility, or even the necessity, of moving beyond these national frameworks altogether. What you’re describing—this movement between Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain—seems to resist any fixed categorisation. Can you explain your material choices in that light, in Venice but also in relation to earlier projects at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2019 and La Ferme du Buisson in Marseille in 2024? I’m interested in how context, place and subject begin to determine the form your work takes.
AB: Sometimes the best way might be a performance or an installation, depending on the subject. For instance, for the project in Venice, the idea of this character that lives with us, between us, but has this shape, was already something I had in mind more than ten years ago. It stayed there, and I was waiting, maybe, for the right moment. When the invitation came, I really wanted to work with a cinematographic image, almost like a kind of “candy paper” for the subject. You know, something very beautiful. I mean, even an iPhone image can be beautiful, but we are used to the language of cinema. So it was the right opportunity. I had more than a year to focus on the work, a curatorial team to work with and, of course, some budget, because cinema is very expensive.
ONE THING NOURISHES ANOTHER
RP: What you’re describing suggests that the material is not a fixed starting point but something that emerges through a convergence of idea, context and opportunity. I wonder, when you arrive at a decision about material, is that something you test and revise through trial and error, or does it feel more instinctive?
AB: I think it comes naturally. Sometimes it’s financial; sometimes it’s also curiosity. For example, when I discovered you could scan your body with those scanners that look like a gun, I immediately thought, I want to scan my body. And that’s what I did. Then later, when I was invited to reflect on what sculpture means today in a sculpture park in Antwerp, I used that 3D scan. It was already there; it accompanied the process. So it’s always like one thing nourishes another. I don’t feel afraid of materials. But materials come second. It’s really what I project into the subject that brings me to how it will manifest.
RP: There’s also a sense, listening to you, that your practice is fundamentally process-driven—that you are learning through each work rather than refining a single formal language. Would you say that your work evolves through experience, through doing, rather than through a predetermined direction?
AB: Yes, very much. That’s the excitement for me, to experience new ways of doing. I have nothing to lose, really. What I gain is the experience of being in this activity, being an artist, having colleagues. Art history is very important to me. I like to make links to other artists, other practices. You’re never alone; it’s always a dialogue with what has been there before and what exists alongside you.
RP: And within that process, there must be moments of failure, of collapse, of things not resolving as expected. I’m interested in how you position those moments: whether they are obstacles or whether they become integral to the way the work develops.
AB: Yes, of course. Failures are part of the process. But after each project, you’ve learned something, and there’s always the energy to continue. What I want is excitement. Even with Venice, I had never worked with film before. It can fail, but it was important for me. At least it allows me to enter another world, the cinema world, which is very different. There’s hierarchy, collaboration, trust.
DARING MORE, FEARING LESS
RP: So your ideas remain open, fluid even, rather than fixed or resolved in advance. It seems that there is a willingness to allow the work to change as it unfolds rather than to control it too tightly from the outset.
AB: Yes. And maybe with time, I care less about failing. Maybe it’s age, or experience. I feel I have nothing to lose, so I dare more. And I think that’s what pushes you further, towards your own limits, towards what you don’t yet know.
RP: One aspect of your work that I find particularly compelling is your relationship to colour, or perhaps more precisely, to its restraint or even its refusal. There is often a tension between material presence and chromatic absence. I’m thinking here especially of your exhibition The Price of the Ticket in Marseille, where colour, or the lack of it, becomes almost ideological. Could you speak about that choice and how you approached colour in that context?
AB: It’s funny because I’m actually quite afraid of colour. I don’t think I’m a very good colourist. Often, I use the natural colour of materials—plaster, for example. But two years ago, I did an exhibition in Marseille called The Price of the Ticket, based on the ideology of Disneyland. The space was a perfect white cube, and I started thinking again about Brian O’Doherty and his writing on the white cube. How neutral is white? So I made everything white: costumes, sculptures, the whole space. But the whiteness became something else. It showed a kind of latent violence. It was too white, almost anaemic, like everything had been drained out. For me, it was about questioning this supposed neutrality.
RP: And in Venice, does colour operate differently? I’m curious whether the shift into film and into a more cinematic language has altered your relationship to colour and image.
AB: Yes, it’s different. The film is very colourful, maybe the most colourful thing I’ve done.
