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 girls’s satisfaction and empowerment by the photo-based artist Kamille Lévêque Jégo. It opened on 11 April within the NegPos artwork and images centre in Nîmes. Throughout the evening 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, in line with Patrice Loubon, the centre’s director. It was the second assault on the gallery, he provides; one week earlier, a window was pressured 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 got seen verbal protests towards 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’t stand to see representations of girls displaying power,” the artist instructed France 3 Occitanie, an area 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 towards feminine photographers”. Their joint assertion additionally recalled the protest led in March by catholic and far-right teams towards an exhibition on immigrant ladies 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 images and video, it follows a “gang of women” 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 ladies on a bike—in a scene evocative of battle movies and dystopian motion motion pictures like Mad Max—certainly one of whom is making ready to throw a Molotov cocktail. The work was proven with out recorded incident at different occasions in southern France, such because the Manifesto pageant in Toulouse in 2018, the place it acquired an award; the Rencontre d’Arles images pageant 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 as a result of run till 13 June Courtesy NegPos and the artist
The conservative metropolis council of Nîmes, in a press release by the deputy answerable for tradition Daniel Jean Valade, expressed its “full help to the gallery and the artist”, describing them as victims of “an imbecile”.
The exhibition, which featured 40 pictures in all, had been as a result of 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 attainable.
“We can not surrender,” the artist says.
