Casino Luxembourg presents Theatre of Cruelty, a group exhibition that brings Antonin Artaud’s radical legacy into dialogue with the contemporary practices
From 15 November 2025 until 8 February 2026, curated by Agnes Gryczkowska
Theatre of Cruelty is a group exhibition on view from November 15, 2025 to February 08, 2026, that brings Antonin Artaud’s radical legacy into dialogue with the contemporary practices of Ed Atkins, Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard, Tobias Bradford, Romeo Castellucci, Pan Daijing, Tadeusz Kantor, Liza Lacroix, and Michel Nedjar.
Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska, at the invitation of Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, this new project unfolds with an extreme theatricality across a variety of artworks, opening itself as a field of exploration for all forms of expression.
The exhibition Theatre of Cruelty takes its name from Antonin Artaud’s radical conception of theatrical performance as ritual and exorcism. Artaud, who was born in Marseille in 1896 and died in 1948, lived a life scorched by illness and torment.
As a child he suffered from meningitis and would endure chronic pain and nervous afflictions. Combined with an acute hypersensitivity to the world, they drew him into states of delirium and madness. He spent nearly a decade of his later life interned in psychiatric asylums and subjected to brutal electroshock treatments. Yet from this extremity emerged one of modernism’s most uncompromising visionaries – a poet, actor, essayist, and theorist who rejected all systems and doctrines, and demanded art be re-forged as a sacred rite.
Written in the 1930s, his manifestos tore open Western theatre’s polite fictions, denouncing the tyranny of text and narrative, and demanding instead a theatre of pure intensity, a theatre of bodies, forces, screams, and convulsions. For Artaud, cruelty was never sadism nor spectacle, but the merciless rigour of existence itself – the implacable necessity that shapes life, death, desire, pain, and ecstasy. His theatre sought to bypass the intellect and pierce directly into nerves, senses, and flesh. To witness it was to undergo initiation, to stand amidst forces that undo language, undo the self, undo the world. In this vision, the stage was no stage at all, but a metaphysical battlefield where the sacred and profane collapsed into one continuous spasm.
For Artaud, “cruelty” was never mere shocking bloodshed, but a merciless intensity – a demand to confront existence in its rawness, its suffering, its ecstasy, and its mortal edge. In a world where pain is aestheticised and suffering is consumed as content, his call to tear aside the curtain and expose what lies beneath is more urgent than ever.
Bringing this vision into the present, the exhibition gathers artists across generations and disciplines— Ed Atkins, Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard, Tobias Bradford, Romeo Castellucci, Pan Daijing, Tadeusz Kantor, Liza Lacroix, and Michel Nedjar.
Through theatre, performance, sound, painting, sculpture, video, and kinetic installation, their works refuse narrative comfort, instead staging acts of exorcisms that unsettle and disturb, embodying existential melancholy, ruptured language, the force of gesture, and the primal energy Artaud imagined.
Exhibition
Theatre of Cruelty
Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain
15.11.2025 – 08.02.2026
Press conference: Thursday 13 November at 11am (please confirme your attendance via mail to micha@clubparadis.be)
Curator: Agnes Gryczkowska
Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain
41, rue Notre-Dame
L-2240 Luxembourg
www.casino-luxembourg.lu
Press contact
Club Paradis
Micha Pycke
micha@clubparadis.be
+32 (0)486 680 070
Selection of images
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The works in the exhibition
This exhibition situates Antonin Artaud as both origin and living presence – the forefather of performance art and a prophet of the crises of modernity. It shows rarely seen drawings made during his time at the asylum in Rodez, France, in the mid-1940s: L’Homme et sa douleur (1946), La Révolte des anges sortis des limbes (1946), and Le Totem (1945–6), alongside his diaries. These works, produced under the violent duress of electroshock therapy, testify to Artaud’s obsession with the body as theatre – not merely flesh, but a metaphysical site where gods, cruelty, and electricity converge. His diaries shift between automatic writing, mystical proclamations, and visceral dissection: bodies torn open, organs dismantled, entrails exposed, threads of fire and force coursing through matter like electric nerves, the aftershocks of his own tortured body. These works are not simply drawings or texts; they are evidence of a life lived in pain and a body remade as weapon. They stage the very thing Artaud demanded of theatre: the destruction of the given body, its reconfiguration into what he would later call the “body without organs” – a dismantled organism freed from function, freed from any system of control, a raw field of unbound intensities and forces.
The entire exhibition space is enveloped in heavy black curtain, echoing Artaud’s insistence that theatre must be staged in the round, breaking the division between actor and spectator. There is no fixed stage here, no frontal view. The visitor walks inside an almost enclosed chamber where the play is everywhere and nowhere. To enter is to step between curtains, to inhabit the coulisses de l’être – the backstage of being – a space where masks drop and the theatre of cruelty unfolds around and through the body. Here, the visitor is not audience but participant, absorbed into the ritual, surrounded by traces, voices, theatrical machines, totems, and spectres.
At the heart of this scenery stretches a landscape of paintings by Pan Daijing (b. 1991). Her Cream Cut 1 and Cream Cut 2 (2024–25) – vast black-and-white expanses made with chalk and pigment – are not images but remnants, inscriptions left by her performances, by bodies in trance-like liminal stages carrying out indecipherable automatic writing, deconstructing language. Staged within a specially built wall structure, they form a topography of traces of states the performers pushed themselves into – states of melancholy, collapse, delirium, and disquieting internal struggle. These are accompanied by Daijing’s sound work Untitled (2022) – a haunting sonic landscape comprising a score of voices, lamentations, and glissandi. Language disintegrates into texture, words unravel into noise, until the air itself becomes thick, tactile, charged with anguish and electricity. Her work is a theatre where performers surrender control, letting anything happen.
The bio-objects of Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) erupt into view: Rat Trap and Cradle from I Shall Never Return (1988), and the Family Machine from his legendary The Dead Class (1975). Kantor, the Polish painter, theatre director, and founder of Cricot 2, was profoundly shaped by war and displacement. His “Theatre of Death” echoed Artaud’s cruelty in its confrontation with mortality and the grotesque. His contraptions emerge as torture machines, at once absurd and sinister, devices that parody domesticity while mutating into cruel operators. Kantor’s bio-objects are simultaneously props and autonomous beings; once activated by actors, they take on a life of their own, until the human is subordinated to the machine. Like Artaud, Kantor conceived theatre as ritual and confrontation, not representation, with the constant presence of the inevitability of death. They both sought to dissolve language into gesture, to reduce the actor to a convulsed body possessed by forces larger than itself. In this exhibition, Kantor’s machines are placed close to Artaud’s diaries, drawing out a shared vision of cruelty: the body stripped of autonomy, subjected to implacable energies, yet through this undoing opening a portal to revelation.
The paintings by Liza Lacroix (b. 1988) are dark canvases steeped in violence and corporeality. Their surface bears the traces of performative gestures – of a rhythm evoking both wound and exorcism. Inspired in part by Nancy Spero’s Artaud works, where skulls thrust out their tongues in grotesque defiance, Lacroix conjures a similar cruelty: a language of paint as raw convulsion. Her use of light and shadow echoes the chiaroscuro traditions of the Renaissance yet detaches illumination from objects. For Artaud, light was never neutral but always cruel – a violent instrument of revelation, and darkness was the abyss from which forms emerge. Lacroix paints within this tension, her gestures are intuitive, driven by the body rather than the mind. Each canvas becomes a trace of possession, an act of painting rather than an image – a lived experience.
The work Restless (2019) by Tobias Bradford (b. 1993) paces in endless circles: a severed leg affixed to a small table, a kinetic sculpture that “walks” when approached by the visitor. Primitive and absurd, it lurches with unnerving sound, a fragment of the body condemned to obsessive repetition. The leg is neither alive nor dead, neither human nor machine, embodying precisely the absurdity Artaud saw at the core of existence – a theatre without resolution, where the body loses its function and becomes a convulsed hieroglyph.
The dolls and drawings by Michel Nedjar (b. 1947) radiate their own ritualistic ferocity. His series Untitled (Darius) (1993–94) and rag dolls, wrapped in cloth, blood, mud, and mourning, resemble relics of sacrifice, vessels of grief transformed into magical effigies. They recall Artaud’s call for objects on stage that are not theatrical props but charged talismans. Nedjar’s works, fragile and brutal, are saturated with memory – mourning and trauma – yet in their assemblage of rags and blood they become weapons of almost sacred ritual magic. They collapse the boundary between art and exorcism.
Tragedia Endogonidia (2002–2004) by Romeo Castellucci (b.1960) inhabits the space as video documents of his iconic theatre play, spanning multiple cities over several years. The cycle fuses tragedy’s fatal drive with the endless reproduction of microscopic organisms – an open system without end. Children’s games unfold beside scenes of cruelty, tenderness collapses into violence, innocence mutates into fascist horror. Castellucci’s theatre stages cruelty as sacred revelation: when language fails, when one is truly abandoned, theatre becomes a space where images convulse with unbearable force. Noise music, strobe lights, machines, animals, fluids – all become operators in a theatre that exceeds narrative, that elopes spectators in an experience of crisis. For Castellucci, as for Artaud, cruelty is not spectacle but metaphysical necessity, the confrontation with reality’s abyssal rigour
The newly commissioned chapter of Une solitude vraiment terrible (2024) by Angélique Aubrit (b. 1988) & Ludovic Beillard (b. 1982) builds an unnerving architectural maze of low ceilings and sub-level corridors, like a bunker after the collapse of civilisation. Hierarchies, systems, status, and power no longer exist and the characters attempt to rebuild the social order in a grotesque parody. Their puppets and performers stumble through language’s ruins, caught between farce and despair. In this, their work resonates with Artaud’s rejection of capitalism, systems, and social masks. Cruelty here is the absurd exposure of human attempts to reconstruct meaning in the void, a theatre of collapse.
Pianoworks 2 (2024) by Ed Atkins (b. 1982) is a video in which the artist’s digital double performs Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück II. Pain, treated as an existential and structural condition, pulses through this virtual body. Atkins uses digital simulation not to conceal but to expose the gap between representation and experience. His avatar, both actor and double, recalls Artaud’s Theatre and Its Double, where theatre does not imitate life but surpasses it, becoming its intensified, dangerous counterpart. Performing the piece, Atkins wrote, was “a gorgeous crisis, a worrying that operates between my roboticness and my trembling humanity.” Long inspired by Artaud, Atkins enacts his vision of cruelty – not the violence of blood, but of truth: the unresolvable tension of expressing suffering through the very systems that obscure it.
About Agnes Gryczkowska
Agnes Gryczkowska is an independent curator, writer, and musician. She has a degree in Art History and Master’s degree in Modern Art History, Curating, and Criticism from the University of Edinburgh.
Between 2019 and 2022, she was the curator at the exhibition Claude Mirrors: Victor Man, Jill Mulleady, Issy Wood (2019). Agnes Gryczkowska also curated Amnesia Scanner: Anesthesia Scammer (2019) and Holly Herndon: PROTO (restaged) (2019) at LAS Art Foundation, Berlin. and she was the Curator at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, where she curated HR Giger & Mire Lee (2021); Sun Rise|Sun Set (2021) with, amongst others, works by Dora Budor, Max Ernst, Max Hooper Schneider, Pierre Huyghe, Emma Kunz, Karrabing Film Collective, Precious Okoyomon, Richard Oelze, Jean Painlevé, Rachel Rose, Pamela Rosenkranz, Henri Rousseau, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Torbjørn Rødland.
Other recent curated exhibitions include the group exhibitions SuperFutures (2022) and Very Friendly at HOUSE, Berlin (2023) presented by Reference Studios, Berlin at Selfridges, London.
Most recently, she curated the Au-delà (2023) exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.
Agnes Gryczkowska was the Assistant Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, London, where she worked on solo exhibitions of works by Etel Adnan, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Simon Denny, Wade Guyton, Grayson Perry, Rachel Rose, Rose Wylie, DAS INSTITUT (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder).
Gryczkowska has authored a number of exhibition texts; has contributed to various contemporary art publications, including BLAU International, Spike, and KALEIDOSCOPE; and has participated in panel discussions, including Art Basel Paris+ Conversations in 2023. She was a visiting lecturer and student mentor at the Royal Danish Academy and BPA// Berlin program for artists.