Julie Béna
Who Wants to Be My Horse?
Artist
Julie Béna
(1982, Paris), French
Original Title
Who Wants to Be My Horse?
Date2018
MediumHD video
Dimensions34min, 38sec
Classificationsmotion pictures
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
Image Copyright
© Julie Béna
DescriptionJulie Béna’s eclectic artistic practice draws inspiration from literature, film, theatre, mythology, art history, mass media, and pop culture. The mediums she uses range from videos, theatre, and performance to sculpture, installation, and objects. She works with everyday images and items, resituating them into fictional contexts of parallel worlds and surrealist narratives. The resultant hybrid artworks fuse reality and illusory imagination, drawing on Béna’s knowledge of theatrical and cinematographic scenography, in which the materiality of hand-crafted objects contrasts the technological and digital nature of other components. In recent years, she has created several personal cosmologies defined by the incorporation of ostensibly banal characters and objects.
This video installation titled Who Wants to Be My Horse? (1974) thematizes the topic of pornography and women’s sexual relations in relation to feminism. Béna’s piece explores the plurality of different stances people aligned with the feminist movement adopt toward these issues, which have polarized the feminist movement since the 1970s. The highly sensual, erotic, expressive video does not voice an explicit opinion on the topic of pornography, despite it being the central issue. The work’s message treats authenticity as a relative quality which has the potential to reform pornography as a genre and counteract extreme and artificial elements traditionally related to the male gaze.
Julie Béna (*1982, Nice) lives and works between Paris and Prague. She studied at the Villa Arson and attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Between 2012 and 2013 she worked in a research laboratory at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She has exhibited at the Passerelle Art Centre in Brest, the Galerie Joseph Tang in Paris, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Polansky Gallery in Brno, among other institutions. Her recent institutional performances took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Ricard and the Palais de Tokyo, all in Paris, and at the Independent art fair in Brussels. In 2018, she was nominated for the Prix AWARE for women artists.
This video installation titled Who Wants to Be My Horse? (1974) thematizes the topic of pornography and women’s sexual relations in relation to feminism. Béna’s piece explores the plurality of different stances people aligned with the feminist movement adopt toward these issues, which have polarized the feminist movement since the 1970s. The highly sensual, erotic, expressive video does not voice an explicit opinion on the topic of pornography, despite it being the central issue. The work’s message treats authenticity as a relative quality which has the potential to reform pornography as a genre and counteract extreme and artificial elements traditionally related to the male gaze.
Julie Béna (*1982, Nice) lives and works between Paris and Prague. She studied at the Villa Arson and attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Between 2012 and 2013 she worked in a research laboratory at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She has exhibited at the Passerelle Art Centre in Brest, the Galerie Joseph Tang in Paris, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Polansky Gallery in Brno, among other institutions. Her recent institutional performances took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Ricard and the Palais de Tokyo, all in Paris, and at the Independent art fair in Brussels. In 2018, she was nominated for the Prix AWARE for women artists.
