Aline Bouvy will exhibit La Merde in the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
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, presented at the Biennale Arte 2026, emerges as a coherent choice, transforming the pavilion into an immersive and reflective artistic experience. 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. 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.
Aline Bouvy La Merde, Luxembourg Pavilion, Arsenale. Sale d’Armi 1st floor Sestiere Castello, Campo Della Tana 2169/F, 30122 Venice from 9th May to 22nd November 2026. Find more information here.
