“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 in the making. In several places, on several levels, something is missing or malfunctioning, but the whole structure appears to be 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 constantly identifies the boundaries between our bodies, spaces, and norms, using wordplay, shifts in scale, and visual distortions to make us reflect 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 while 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 colorful pop world inhabited by dolls. Somewhere between the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, this sugar-coated scene is the result of enlarging an image of figurines until they have become very strange indeed. Then, 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. Where she turns her attention to the architecture of theme parks and amusement parks with the aim of subverting the mechanisms of the entertainment industry, a doubt persists as to what we are seeing and what we think we are seeing. Between voids and reflections, a more or less conscious interplay of perceptions and sensations is distributed through space and sets 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 makes use of object-sculptures with very basic forms made from ordinary materials, which are strongly reminiscent of Minimalism. 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 whitepainted wood. On the border between confinement, desire, and primal need, everything relating to the body is white.

Formatted and codified, in the Western world, white is synonymous with whitening and whiteness, since it embodies purity and virginity as well as innocence, wisdom, peace, cleanliness, health, and modernity. (1) The principal points of hygiene depend to a large extent on the status of women. It’s up to the housewife, the maid, the housekeeper to make tangible the acceptable compromise with all the traces left by human existence. (2) Bouvy plays with the register of the maquette in order to dissect, dismantle, and reconfigure domestic space—the symbol of a place where social relations are unequal—, like in the arrangements created by US artist Julie Becker. Becker has also explored domestic and commercial spaces in scale models, in an approach combining temporality, social mobility, and imagination.

Functionality and fiction combine, encapsulating the works in a universe that is both fantastic and fanciful. Like a special effect in the movies, the strange blend is formalized in an extra-ordinary encounter with an alter ego. 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 totally emancipatory and subversive, this work invites us to enter into an imaginary of the double and thus of otherness. The work operates the montage of a past world in a future placed at the service of the species (3) of self-reproduction, of procreation that would give meaning to our experience of the time to come. In his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, (4) Lee Edelman critiques an ideology based on “reproductive futurism,” centered on an exaggerated valorization of and obsession with reproduction. This reproductive futurism is symbolized by the figure of the Child (capitalized by Edelman), who would help to produce, make intelligible, and legitimize policies that defend patriarchy, the family, heteronormativity, and thus social immobility.

Against a conservative system of human, social, political, cultural, and historical reproduction, Edelman crystallizes the stakes of social value tied to age, particularly that of women. If aging is the set of functional modifications that progressively diminish the ability of an object, a unit of information, or an organism to perform its functions over time, it may also be synonymous with decrepitude, frustration, and isolation. This social construction based on biology and over-consumption can be outmaneuvered in order to free ourselves from the burden of the many injunctions placed on our bodies. Daily life and intimacy are part of this radical change, a total revolution (5), harnessing the transformative power of art.(6)

1 Michel Pastoureau, White: The History of a Color (Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2023).

2 Camille Saint-Jacques, Le mouvement ouvrier. Une histoire des gestes créateurs des travailleurs (Paris: Max Milo Éditions, 2008).

3 Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood.

4 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 2016).

5 Olga Bronnikova and Matthieu Renault, Défaire la famille, refaire l’amour (Paris: La Fabrique, 2024). Book about the Soviet revolutionary, feminist, and politician Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952).

6 bell hooks, “Introduction: Art Matters,” Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: The New Press, 1995), xv.

Marianne Derrien

Translation Jack Cox (FR/EN)