Feminist art show vandalised at French photography centre

A feminist art exhibition in the south France has been largely destroyed in an attack by one or more vandals who smashed works and spray-painted phalluses and images of sexual penetration on the walls.

Entitled Cyprine Benzin, the exhibition was a celebration of women’s pride and empowerment by the photo-based artist Kamille Lévêque Jégo. It opened on 11 April in the NegPos art and photography centre in Nîmes. During the night of 25 April to 26 April, a perpetrator or multiple perpetrators broke into the gallery and destroyed more than 30 of the 40 works on view, according to Patrice Loubon, the centre’s director. It was the second attack on the gallery, he adds; one week earlier, a window was forced open and one work was damaged by an intruder.

“It is really upsetting to see how the masculinist backlash can have such an influence in our society,” Loubon tells The Art Newspaper. “We have seen verbal protests against feminist exhibitions before, including in our centre, when a neighbour, a convert to Islam, insulted an artist. But never anything like this.”

“They cannot stand to see representations of women showing strength,” the artist told France 3 Occitanie, a local TV station. “The immature and silly drawings of phalluses are not an excuse for such vandalism.”

Three professional networks of photographers and photographic events (Zoom, Diagonal and Les Filles de la Photo) denounced a “growing climate of intolerance against female photographers”. Their joint statement also recalled the protest led in March by catholic and far-right groups against an exhibition on immigrant women in the Basilique Cathédrale Saint-Denis, near Paris, which shelters the tombs of the Kings of France.

Cyprine Benzin is a work in progress, which Kamille Lévêque Jégo started in 2014. Using photography and video, it follows a “gang of girls” asserting their “flamboyant femininity”. On her website, the artist says she is using the techniques of advertising and pop culture to inform the project. The photograph used for the exhibition poster features two women on a motorcycle—in a scene evocative of war films and dystopian action movies like Mad Max—one of whom is preparing to throw a Molotov cocktail. The work was shown without recorded incident at other events in southern France, such as the Manifesto festival in Toulouse in 2018, where it received an award; the Rencontre d’Arles photography festival in 2019; and, in 2023, at the Nuits Photographiques de Pierrevert.

The conservative city council of Nîmes, in a statement by the deputy in charge of culture Daniel Jean Valade, expressed its “full support to the gallery and the artist”, describing them as victims of “an imbecile”.

The exhibition, which featured 40 photographs in all, had been due to remain open until 13 June. The centre has remained closed since the attack, with the shattered prints, frames and furniture in place on the floor for the purposes of an ongoing criminal investigation. But the director and the artist are determined to stage another exhibition as soon as possible.

“We cannot give up,” the artist says.