Aline Bouvy (b. 1974, Watermael-Boitsfort, Belgium) is a Luxembourgish visual artist who lives and works between Brussels and Luxembourg. Trained at ERG – École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, she has built a multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, installation, sound, moving image, and publication. Rather than treating objects as self-contained statements, she uses the exhibition as a constructed situation where norms and social codes are tested in public.

Bouvy’s work is informed by a feminist outlook and an acute attention to the power mechanisms that shape desire. With rigorous systems, careful construction, and a deliberately offbeat humour, she returns to what society labels clean or dirty, proper or inappropriate, visible or marginal. Shame is central to her thinking, not as confession, but as a cultural instrument that regulates what can be shown, who can speak, and what must be concealed. Her projects often respond to their sites, borrowing from architecture and display to create thresholds, detours, and moments of uneasy recognition.

Her recent trajectory includes the large-scale solo exhibition Cruising Bye at MACS Grand-Hornu (2022), as well as presentations at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019), New Space, Liège (2020), Kunsthal Gent (2021), and Triangle-Astérides, Marseille (2024). In 2025, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain hosted her solo show Hot Flashes, a choreographed passage that played with scale, reflection, and shifts from childhood to adulthood. The exhibition embodied her conviction that the exhibition itself is her primary medium, a place where space and relation intertwine.

In 2026, Aline Bouvy will represent Luxembourg at the 61st Venice Biennale with La Merde, on view on the first floor of the Sale d’Armi in the Arsenale from 9 May to 22 November. In the conversation that follows, she speaks about moving between research and production, and treating filmmaking as an open process that stays flexible until the end. She also returns to her long-standing interest in sound as a spatial experience, and to wit as a way of creating distance without neutralising discomfort. The result is a film project that confronts impurity and social sorting, while insisting on the viewer’s active role within its staging. Alongside the immersive audiovisual installation, a publication expands her archive of scatological images and references, developed with designer Olivier Vandervliet and including texts by Jessica Gysel and Robert Garnett. Curated by Stilbé Schroeder, the Venice presentation sharpens Bouvy’s focus on how expectations are enforced, and how they can be unsettled.

Last fall you presented the solo exhibition Hot Flashes at Casino Luxembourg, exploring stages and passages across a lifetime. Where would you place yourself now? What phase are you in?

I’ve had a little more than a year to focus almost exclusively on the Venice Biennale project, conceived as a film, an installation, and a publication. It seems like a lot of time, certainly because it’s also a project I’ve been nurturing in my mind for nearly a decade, and yet everything has happened very fast. Many aspects of my practice are coming together with this project. There are ideas I’ve already tackled in previous works. The publication part was deeply fulfilling, as I could indulge my interest in digging and researching. My interest in space and architecture comes together with a different intensity through close collaboration with people I’ve been working with for a few years now. Sound, and the ways in which it is experienced in space, is also a recurring interest of mine, but it takes on a new dimension within this project.

Nevertheless, there’s also an unfamiliar, and therefore exciting, new way of working, which is filmmaking. Translating my ideas and feelings into a script, gathering a film crew, organizing the whole shoot, and then entering the long months of editing, both image and sound, have all opened new processes for me. It really is my favorite part, and I’m still very busy with it, reorganizing, changing, experimenting, actually working on this film as if it were an exhibition in its own right. I wanted the process to remain very open. I’m lucky enough to be working with patient and committed film and sound editors, as well as with a graphic designer who is constantly flowing with invaluable ideas.

You’ve said before you don’t privilege any medium, because the exhibition itself is your medium. What do you mean by that?

I understand it as thinking and working towards the idea of the exhibition as a whole. I might first think of its general design, atmosphere, and light. More importantly, I need to find a way to make the space speak so that it starts to reveal something very deep or hidden within itself, and becomes the catalyst for the feelings and perceptions I want to provoke. I really need something to happen with the space. So the individual works in the exhibition almost become subordinate to the larger idea of the exhibition.

The exhibition is like a stage, a construction, just as artworks are constructions. Does this make the works become props? Maybe. They are all important, but in the end I’m not that attached to the individual works. For me, only a few of them are separable from the exhibition context they were conceived for. That’s why I rarely produce works on their own.

Space and architecture feel decisive here. I’m thinking of your mirror-glass and steel installation, structural, almost pavilion-like, with an echo of Dan Graham. How do you direct the viewer’s movement through your works?

That work, Wall, is a good example of how I like to approach a given space. On the floor plan, I noticed there was a possibility to play with the different entrances to the Casino’s exhibition space. By placing a divider, the public would have two different route options to experience the exhibition, and also experience their own perception through the mirror-glass, in a choreographic way.

My interest in the perception of space is inseparable from a reflection on how we perceive one another as human beings, and more specifically, the mechanisms that inform that perception, moving from architecture to psychology, from spatial perception to relational perception. Dan Graham is of course an important influence here. The reference is very clear. But where I believe the work drifts away from Dan Graham is with the addition of the two hybrid sculptures, E.T. The Excremential, a morphing between E.T. and myself, positioned to face each other across the partition wall.

The body—human, non-human, gendered, in glory and decay—reappears throughout your work. What keeps drawing you back to the corporeal?

I guess the experience of my own body is the closest tool I have from which I can think and work. I think about its social and performative expectations, and how it feels shame, desire, or rejection. I often put it in weird situations that can sometimes be uneasy for me, but that’s how I can push the boundaries of its limits and, with a bit of distance, keep it manageable.

Humor is also persistent, as if you’re winking at the viewer. Is it a strategy, or is it simply how you move through the world?

This distance I’m mentioning can certainly happen through the use of humor. Humor creates a gap. It lets discomfort exist without immediately shutting it down. Humor engages in an affirmative process of becoming. Whether it mirrors who I am in daily life, I don’t know.

You’re preparing to represent Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale with a project titled La Merde. Why this title? Why “shit”?

It’s the subject of my film, in all its splendor, in all its sadness, in all its tragic, comic, abject, and deeply human dimensions.

Who is the protagonist, and how does the narrative take shape?

There is a central character that changes appearance throughout the film. At times it’s a puppet, at others an animated figure. It can also appear as an abstract presence, a stain, a smell, or an embodied character. What matters is not psychology or narrative development, but the effect this presence has on its environment and on those who encounter it.

The film is composed of different scenes, and I prefer to describe them as arranged in a circular structure rather than in a loop. I like to think that the film recycles itself once all the scenes have played out. This structure reflects what the film is ultimately about.

Shame seems to be an important thread. Shame about what, and how do you handle it?

I’m interested in shame as a social mechanism rather than a personal confession. Shame regulates behavior. It marks what should remain hidden, controlled, or excluded. By placing viewers in situations where attraction and discomfort coexist, it can make those mechanisms perceptible without explaining them.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Should we read this project through that lens?

That feels like a bit of a euphemism. I don’t necessarily want the work to be read through a particular lens, including that one. Feminism certainly informs how I think and work, it’s part of my position in the world, but I would rather the project be encountered as it comes, through the experience it creates.

How will the pavilion installation be structured? What kind of setting will hold the film?

It is structured around a modified version of Wall (2025), a work I first presented at Casino Luxembourg. It will be transformed into a half-circle architectural structure, lined with acoustic padding on the ceiling and inner walls. I think of it as a kind of communal headphone. The idea is to create an enclosed, immersive environment that holds the film acoustically.

The audience sits inside this space on chairs that also appear within the film itself, functioning as a sort of extension of the film. I’ve been closely collaborating with Pierre Dozin, aka Late Bush, on the sound design and musical score of the film. He also developed the 4DSOUND programming, which allows the main character to sound different at each viewing, making it feel even more alive.

In recent years, there’s been a clear rise in moving-image presentations at the Venice Biennale, often with highly elaborate productions. Why do you think that is?

I’ve only been to the biennial three times, with long gaps in between, so I don’t really feel in a position to comment on that.

There will also be an accompanying publication. Is it a catalogue, a making-of, or something else?

The publication has been an amazing process. In 2024, I started frenetically collecting images of shit-related artworks, films, photographs, and more. At first, I thought I would include all these images in the film somewhere, but later, together with the graphic designer Olivier Vandervliet, we developed the archive into a non-exhaustive anthology.

It has been a crazy process getting in touch with living artists, directly or through their galleries, to ask for permission to reproduce their works. Some really interesting conversations have come out of it, and it feels like I’ve made a new network of ‘shit friends’ around the world. The publication itself is quite small. It looks a bit like the Bibles you find in German hotel rooms, with a dark brown textured cover and LA MERDE printed and embossed in gold. Furthermore, the publication includes two excellent texts by Jessica Gysel and Robert Garnett.

I’m very happy with how it turned out because it works as an autonomous object, while also showing how artists have used bodily material, both literally and in a more symbolic or conceptual way, to speak about politics, life and death, or simply for sheer fun.

The Venice Biennale is a milestone. What do you hope this participation will open up for you?

I feel lucky that Stilbé Schroeder, my curator, shares the same mindset as me. Of course it’s an important event, but we don’t overthink it. I see it as a celebration as well, certainly with artist friends like Pavel Braila representing Moldova. For Moldova, it has been a long process that required a lot of effort to finally participate in this year’s edition.

Pavel is a longtime friend. We were together at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and we even went together for the first time to the Venice Biennale in 2001, along with Robert Garnett, who is also contributing to the catalogue and who was in the theory department at the same time as us. It feels very special to be here ourselves as artists, 25 years later.

I have no idea what it will unlock for me. I’m more curious, and concerned, about how the Biennale will respond to the state of the world, and what it might or might not unlock at that level.