Aline Bouvy: Hot Flashes

“Is it just me, or is it hot in here?” As soon as you enter the exhibition, the setting of Hot Flashes has been established: a world within a world, both tiny and immense. An upheaval within us is underway. In several places, on multiple levels, something is missing or malfunctioning, but the overall structure appears to be well-scripted. If our conception of order and disorder, cleanliness and dirtiness, skill and clumsiness, the well done and the poorly done is disturbed here, this will gradually transform into an introspection full of surprises. Belgian-Luxembourg artist Aline Bouvy consistently explores the boundaries between our bodies, spaces, and norms, employing wordplay, shifts in scale, and visual distortions to prompt reflection on our willing—sometimes even blind—participation in a given social order. Her prolific, protean, at times disturbing works draw on the imagery of popular culture. At the same time, their strong sensorial charge is linked to identity in its latent and sexual, as well as domestic, intimate, and political aspects.

The exhibition opens with a large mural depicting a colourful pop world inhabited by dolls. Little by little, everything unfolds in a visual, double journey, at once seductive and repulsive, funny and frightening, where subject and object combine. This back-and-forth between trivial imagery and such a highly codified formal proposition is characteristic of the tensions at play in Bouvy’s work. Between voids and reflections, a conscious interplay of perceptions and sensations is distributed throughout space, setting the pace of our experience of the exhibition.

A large-scale installation of one-way mirrors—a reference to Dan Graham’s pavilions—structures and articulates the main exhibition space, contrasting with other, more intimate groups of works. Bouvy utilises object sculptures with elementary forms crafted from ordinary materials. Addressing the theme of the domesticity of interior spaces, her works parody both architecture and conceptual sculpture, revealing the affective dimension that accompanies these objects. In a tragicomic register, this revisiting of the useful and the ordinary takes shape in sometimes absurd constructions that subvert mass-produced kitchen furniture in white-painted wood. Bouvy plays with the register of the maquette to dissect, dismantle, and reconfigure domestic space, the symbol of a place where social relations are unequal.

Functionality and fiction combine, encapsulating the works in a universe that is both fantastic and fanciful, much like a special effect in a movie. A mutant, chimerical body is generated, where the body of E.T., the extraterrestrial character from Steven Spielberg’s famous film, merges with Bouvy’s own. The quest to return home (“E.T., go home!”) is synonymous with a more intimate quest filled with memories. As the metamorphosis takes place, the vision expands, claiming a childlike position, lower and smaller. Deceptively regressive, in fact emancipatory and subversive, this work invites us to enter an imaginary of the double and thus of otherness.

Against a conservative system of human, social, political, cultural, and historical reproduction, Lee Edelman, author of the book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, crystallises the stakes of social value tied to age, particularly that of women. Suppose aging is the set of functional modifications that progressively diminish the ability of an object, unit of information, or an organism's ability to perform its functions over time. In that case, it may also be synonymous with decrepitude, frustration, and isolation. This social construction, based on biology and over-consumption, can be outmaneuvered to free ourselves from the burden of the many injunctions placed on our bodies.

Text (excerpts) by Marianne Derrien

In 2026, Aline Bouvy will represent the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale.

About Aline Bouvy Born in 1974 in Watermael-Boitsfort (Belgium), Aline Bouvy is a visual artist whose work touches on the universal. Her art acts as a tool for questioning bodies, spaces, and norms, subverting conventions while drawing on a feminist vision. Aline Bouvy studied at the ERG – École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels, then at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Among her solo exhibitions, Cruising Bye at MACS Grand Hornu in Charleroi in 2022 constitutes the largest collection of her works shown to date. Recently, her work has been shown at Triangle-Astérides in Marseille (2024), Kunsthal Gent in Ghent (2021), New Space in Liège (2020), and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2019).

Curator: Stilbé Schroeder.
In collaboration with Salzburger Kunstverein. With the support of the Fondation Indépendance by BIL.
Trailer: Raoul Schmitz