Aline Bouvy presents La Merde at the Luxembourg pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2026

The artist

Aline Bouvy (b.1974, Watermael-Boitsfort, Belgium) is a Luxembourgish artist who lives and works in Brussels and Luxembourg. She studied at the ERG – École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Her multidisciplinary practice questions social structures, normative systems, and the power mechanisms that control behavior and desire.

Working with detailed formal systems, a rigorous aesthetic, and a decidedly quirky sense of humor, the artist explores how certain norms—especially those related to gender and the body, or to the understanding of cleanliness and dirtiness—establish hierarchies, induce exclusion, or create invisibility. Her projects are inspired by the contexts in which they are exhibited, exploring narratives or images deemed marginal, inappropriate, or unsuitable.

Aline Bouvy describes her approach as an expression of artistic freedom that refuses to adapt to society’s expectations, thereby causing friction with its very presence. For her, shame is an area of instability between order and chaos, between the body and its appearance, between symbolism and substance.

In response to the resurgence of exclusionary mechanisms in contemporary society, Aline Bouvy’s project La Merde, presented at the Biennale Arte 2026, emerges as a coherent choice, transforming the pavilion into an immersive and reflective artistic experience.

La Merde – Presentation of the film project
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​At the Biennale Arte 2026, Aline Bouvy presents La Merde, a film project that is in line with her artistic reflections. The film features a main protagonist—a female anthropomorphic excrement figure that, by turns, materializes as a puppet, a 2D animation, a mere trace, and an embodied character. The spectators follow her through various stages of her life: during a hygiene lesson in a classroom her existence comes to serve as a teaching tool; on a tram ride she is restrained, shoved, and made invisible in the public space; in a bar, intimacy and desire become the grounds for negotiating her own body; in a bedroom her solitude reveals the attrition of self-restraint; and finally in a public performance, based on Dan Graham’s Identification/Projection (1977), she comes face-to-face with an audience and a system that leads to judgement, unease, and identification.

Between the scenes, archival images are blended in, drawn from art history, popular culture, scientific illustrations, and the internet, showing bodies as they relieve themselves, expel dejections, lose control, and transgress cleanliness. These documents create a collective memory of the things society tries to relegate to the sidelines—a history of gestures of rejection, their uses, and their moral treatment.

La Merde is a film that explores shame as a social construct and exposes the thresholds at which humans are categorized, tolerated, repressed, or excluded. Through the figure of the female anthropomorphic excrement, the film analyzes the way society produces bodies over which it demands control and restraint. When restraint gives way, not through choice but because a limit has been reached, the situation changes dramatically: that which has been contained, shows its true nature and reveals itself in broad daylight. It leads to a discharge—political, physiological, emotional—where the internalized violence outs itself in the same way in which it was inflicted.

La Merde is a Rabelaisian farce in which the female anthropomorphic excrement serves to criticize the place of abjection in Western culture. Here, shame functions as a moving line between inclusion and rejection, between visibility and invisibility. The film is part of a broader theoretical reflection in which abjection is seen as blurring categories, threatening the coherence of the subject, and exceeding the symbolic framework of cleanliness, form, and control. Against this backdrop, the work also questions the relationship between abjection and femininity, as defined by theoricist Julia Kristeva¹. Indeed, if society has historically assigned women the status of “human pollution” (unlike men, who are seen as able to “manage their fluids”), then they can only think in terms of abjection. Their fluids and bodies become a privileged ground for understanding how social order produces and manages shame. Waste—whether material, emotional, or symbolic—becomes a vector of subversive energy. The figure of the female anthropomorphic excrement experiences grotesque, pathetic, ironic, and tender moments, revealing the mechanisms behind rejection and the areas where they crack.

La Merde can be seen as a feminist manifesto in the form of a cinematographic essay, an exploration of shame as a social construct, but also as a potential response to the systemic violence that shapes bodies and behavior.

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^{1. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur : essai sur l’abjection, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1980.}

An immersive audiovisual installation
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​The audiovisual installation—which consists of a 4.5 by 2-meter high-resolution LED screen set up in the Pavilion—employs cinematography reminiscent of a feature film and uses the conventional codes of cinema.

The film team and cast were selected by the artist, film director, and screenwriter Aline Bouvy. It includes co-screenwriter François Pirot, external eye Tanguy Poujol, director of cinematography Olivier Boonjing, and actors Marie Bos, Damien Chapelle, Lucie Debay, Marc Guillaume, and Louise Manteau; 2D animation by Lora D’Addazio, visual effects by Boris Wilmot, and editing by Laurence Vaes. La Merde is a coproduction by Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, escautville, and Salzburger Kunstverein.

Sound plays an essential role in the installation. It was designed in partnership with sound engineer and composer Pierre Dozin, with whom the artist has collaborated for many years.

The design uses cutting-edge audio spatialization tools that evolve and transform in real time.

The acoustics were designed to create an anthropomorphic, lively, almost autonomous entity, a space that is in constant flux, blurring the lines between the soundtrack and the surrounding space. The audience is immersed in a dynamic soundscape, a unique experience where the audio unfolds freely.

To ensure full immersion, a soundproofed, semi-circular structure was designed in collaboration with architect Antoine Rocca and Ateliers Arseni (Brice Dreessen). It consists of a pre-existing, newly adjusted version of the work Wall (2025-26), a mirror-glass and steel structure produced for Bouvy’s solo exhibition Hot Flashes at Casino Luxembourg in 2025. The mirrored surface creates layers of reflections, blurring the perception of the surrounding space and of one’s own place within it, entangling the relationships it forms.

The augmented visual experience is enhanced by a sculpture representing an imaginary character. Exposing yourself, being yourself, or being someone else leads to an extraordinary experience. An alter-ego in the body of a utopian mutant, where the appearance of the extra-terrestrial from Steven Spielberg’s iconic film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) merges with the face and body of the artist and becomes E.T. The Excremential (title of the sculpture). As a modern, popular tale of difference and otherness, the sculpture resonates with the film in its engagement with the abject.

La Merde is an immersive audiovisual installation that combines film, sound, and sculpture into a hybrid experience. The scene is set; an inner upheaval may arise.

The Publication

The publication is a book-object, dense yet simple. With approximately 300 pages, it was designed as a visual archive and manifesto. The book includes about 250 images taken from art history, popular culture, folklore, academic research, and the internet. Rasterized and printed in a brown duotone, the images have been consciously standardized, despite the wide range of sources,

to create a visual continuum that transcends time and categories. The graphic flow presents images of excrement—as matter, metaphor, or political act—throughout the centuries.

The book opens with a preface by the editorial directors, Stilbé Schroeder (curator of the Pavilion) and Mirela Baciak (director of Salzburger Kunstverein). Additional texts were commissioned from British researcher, writer, and critic Robert Garnett and Belgian writer, artist, and activist Jessica Gysel. The text is followed by a section of captions and a selection of color stills from the film. The publication is considered a work in its own right, both conceptual and sensory and is co-published by Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, Triangle Books and Salzburger Kunstverein.

Practical information

61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia Luxembourg Pavilion, Arsenale. Sale d’Armi 1st floor

La Merde
​Aline Bouvy

Commisioner appointed by the Ministry of Culture, Luxembourg: Kultur | lx − Arts Council Luxembourg ​
​Curator: Stilbé Schroeder | Casino Luxembourg − Forum d’art contemporain
​Exhibitor: Aline Bouvy
​Assistant curator: Thibaud Leplat
​Organizer: Casino Luxembourg − Forum d’art contemporain ​
​Visual Identity: Olivier Vandervliet | Triangle Books

Official opening of the Luxembourg Pavillion
​Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 17:30
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​Press preview of the Luxembourg Pavillion
​Thursday, 7 May 2026 at 14:00 (TBC)
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​Preview days at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia
​6-8 May 2026
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​Exhibition
​9 May to 22 November 2026

Full press kit

Press contacts

www.venicebiennale.kulturlx.lu — Instagram @venicebiennaleluxembourg

La Merde, Aline Bouvy, 2026 (film still)

Aline Bouvy et Stilbé Schroeder. © Ernest Thiesmeier, 2025