A feminist artwork exhibition within the south France has been largely destroyed in an assault by a number of vandals who smashed works and spray-painted phalluses and pictures of sexual penetration on the partitions.
Entitled Cyprine Benzin, the exhibition was a celebration of ladies’s satisfaction and empowerment by the photo-based artist Kamille Lévêque Jégo. It opened on 11 April within the NegPos artwork and pictures centre in Nîmes. Throughout the night time of 25 April to 26 April, a perpetrator or a number of perpetrators broke into the gallery and destroyed greater than 30 of the 40 works on view, based on Patrice Loubon, the centre’s director. It was the second assault on the gallery, he provides; one week earlier, a window was compelled open and one work was broken by an intruder.
“It’s actually upsetting to see how the masculinist backlash can have such an affect in our society,” Loubon tells The Artwork Newspaper. “We’ve seen verbal protests in opposition to feminist exhibitions earlier than, together with in our centre, when a neighbour, a convert to Islam, insulted an artist. However by no means something like this.”
Vandalised works by Kamille Lévêque Jégo and tags left by a number of vandals at NegPos in Nîmes, France © Patrice Loubon
“They can not stand to see representations of ladies exhibiting power,” the artist informed France 3 Occitanie, a neighborhood TV station. “The immature and foolish drawings of phalluses should not an excuse for such vandalism.”
Three skilled networks of photographers and photographic occasions (Zoom, Diagonal and Les Filles de la Picture) denounced a “rising local weather of intolerance in opposition to feminine photographers”. Their joint assertion additionally recalled the protest led in March by catholic and far-right teams in opposition to an exhibition on immigrant girls within the Basilique Cathédrale Saint-Denis, close to Paris, which shelters the tombs of the Kings of France.
Cyprine Benzin is a piece in progress, which Kamille Lévêque Jégo began in 2014. Utilizing pictures and video, it follows a “gang of ladies” asserting their “flamboyant femininity”. On her web site, the artist says she is utilizing the methods of promoting and popular culture to tell the undertaking. The {photograph} used for the exhibition poster options two girls on a bike—in a scene evocative of conflict movies and dystopian motion films like Mad Max—considered one of whom is getting ready to throw a Molotov cocktail. The work was proven with out recorded incident at different occasions in southern France, such because the Manifesto competition in Toulouse in 2018, the place it obtained an award; the Rencontre d’Arles pictures competition in 2019; and, in 2023, on the Nuits Photographiques de Pierrevert.
The poster for Kamille Lévêque Jégo’s exhibition at NegPos, Benzine Cyprine, which was unique resulting from run till 13 June Courtesy NegPos and the artist
The conservative metropolis council of Nîmes, in an announcement by the deputy in command of tradition Daniel Jean Valade, expressed its “full assist to the gallery and the artist”, describing them as victims of “an imbecile”.
The exhibition, which featured 40 images in all, had been resulting from stay open till 13 June. The centre has remained closed for the reason that assault, with the shattered prints, frames and furnishings in place on the ground for the needs of an ongoing legal investigation. However the director and the artist are decided to stage one other exhibition as quickly as doable.
“We can’t quit,” the artist says.
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