This year, Luxembourg’s Pavillion at 61st Venice Biennale featured artist Aline Bouvy, with curation by Stilbé Schroeder and in collaboration with Casino Luxembourg- Forum d’art contemporain. Titled LA MERDE, the exhibition presents the audience with an immersive “shit show” experience that combines film, sound, sculpture and a personal anthology publication. Bouvy’s uncomfortable contribution to this year’s biennale examines shame as a social construct and how certain social norms, particularly those related to gender and the body, establish hierarchies, cause exclusions or create invisibility.
Aline Bouvy is a Luxembourg based artist, who throughout her practice, resists societal expectations by continually questioning the body, space, and social conventions through a distinctly feminist perspective. Her work challenges established ways of thinking, inviting audiences to reconsider ideas of identity, normality, and power. Her presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale exemplifies this approach. Working across a multitude of different mediums her work inspires us to remember that art does not always have to be beautiful, but it can be grotesque, unsettling, or most of all art can involve turds.
“Her installations do not decorate white walls, they contaminate them”.
A perfect summary to describe her installation in this years biennale. Bouvy creates a space for quiet reflection, aligning with the theme In Minor Keys. Her works explore society’s reluctance to acknowledge the realities of our bodily fluids, exposing the restrictive nature of social expectations and the pressures we face to conform to these demanding norms.
La Merde as a project originated from Bouvy’s experience within her studio, where due to a lack of toilet facilities led her to collect her own urine in plastic bottles. The accumulation of her own urine and coming face to face with her bodily waste prompted reflections with ways in which society treats the body’s most universal function as taboo.
The beating heart of the exhibition surrounds a short film, directed by Bouvy, that enacts as a collective ‘laxative’ for the audience. Realising all of the pent-up thoughts and feelings that keep us constipated in our lives. This show does not hide who and what it is trying to be. La Merde is designed to be a confronting experience, set out to gain audible reactions from its audience. Being immersed in the film and experiencing every laugh, gasp or “ewww” feels exactly how the film was meant to be experienced, not by yourself but being confronted with societal expectations of shame as a collective. Although everything has a double meaning Bouvy does not shy away from poo talk and there are no “dirty little secrets.” LA MERDE is about faeces. It is about the shit in our lives, in our toilets, thrown against the walls and sprayed out of the mouths of those who embody the word.
La Merde is presented within the most visually striking element of the installation. A mirrored steel structure that is not simple acting as a reflective surface but a multiplier, visually imbedding the audience within the installation. This is so before encountering someone else, viewers are met with themselves and continuously reminding viewers of their own visibility.
Apon entering Bouvy’s mirrored cave a film plays in a continuous loop on a large LED screen. This monumental screen enlarges imagery of bodily functions that are normally associated with privacy and concealment, by exhibiting them into this space reverses the normally accepted visual hierarchies. Transforming something that is culturally invisible into the central spectacle of the exhibition.
Using particular 4D sound techniques when the audience is watching the film they are truly immersed and inside Bouvy’s creation. The storyline is not linear, there is no beginning or end, the film simply moves forward in a circular motion following the protagonist allowing viewers to enter and exit at any moment.
The protagonist of the film is an anthropomorphised turd called “La Merde” played by actress Lucie Debay. It is a ‘Rabelaisian Farce’ in which La Merde serves to critique Western culture by switching between realism and fantasy.1 Through the absurdist humour and surreal grotesque imagery creates a narrative that criticises how humans ‘naturally’ are and how society categorises, represses and excludes one another based on their external features. This film creates an important role for its audience where their own projections become reflections, allowing for an expanded thanking into our own exclusionary practices.
The film’s climax, in which La Merde addresses the audience from a stage with patronising and sexually charged language, evokes comparisons with Dan Grahams Performer/Audience/Mirror. Graham’s work uses a mirror to expose the reciprocal relationship between performer and spectator, encouraging viewers to become conscious of themselves as both subjects and objects of observation. Similarly, in La Merde, spectators first see themselves reflected objectively before becoming the object of La Merde’s gaze. By creating this reversal destabilises the conventional role of the audience, merging them within the performance and reinforcing the work’s exploration of shame, self-consciousness, and the politics of prejudice observation.
Another component of the exhibition is the sculpture E.T The Excremential, a life-sized figure that merges the body of Steven Spielberg’s alien E.T with the face and body of the artist. This work first debuted in Bouvy’s 2025 solo exhibition Hot Flashes at Casino Luxembourg and now is presented against the mirrored walls in the Luxembourg pavilion. E.T is a character that exceeds all social norms. They are wrinkled and short, with long limbs and large feet. He is deemed ugly. However, this is not what we as viewers are focused on instead, we see the character E.T not as a figure who embodies hideousness but of hope and healing. Now, we see them transformed and merged with Bouvy to create a smoothed, colourless version of the figure. Trapped in motion, meeting their other self and inviting viewers to do the same. By creating a hybridised version of a cinematic icon with a sense of objectification, Bouvy transforms E.T into a metaphor of social exclusion and reminder to its viewers that the bodies society rejects the most are those who are the most deserving of empathy.
Aline Bouvy’s La Merde exhibition does not just rely solely on the shock value alone, but she is challenging her viewers. The exhibition’s ability to do this greatly attribute’s to it’s harmonious qualities. Each element reinforces the central themes and creates a visually engaging and psychologically unsettling space. By integrating film, sculpture, architecture and sound into an immersive exploration of shame creates a space that transforms it’s audience into participants without them even knowing. However, when briefly passing through the space it is hard to understand it’s full effect. Due to the topic of poo being ultimately provocative nature many audience members were turned away by this fact. Funnily enough though this factor almost becomes another layer to Bouvy’s exhibition, sitting in the audience watching other viewers groaning and covering their eyes from the imagery highlighted just how taboo the topic of poo can really be. Ultimately, La Merde succeeds as a thoughtful and immersive installation, demonstrating that its scatological imagery serves as a vessel for examining boarder questions of shame, identity, femineity and criticising Western culture and societal norms.