5 Questions – Julie Béna & Mark Ther: Double Take

CH Both of your practices blur the boundaries between theatre, cinema, installation and performance. Julie, your work unfolds through fictional characters and fragmented narratives, while Mark’s staged images often revisit queer identity, memory and overlooked histories. How did these two artistic languages first meet in Le Chat Noir, and what did Parnas make possible for your collaboration?

JB & MT JB: We have known each other with Mark for more than ten years. I think we deal with similar topics, we like to play with artifice, characters and role play as much as erotic twists, but each of us treat those very differently. I really like how Mark manages to handle a certain sweetness and classical forms with subtle perversity and how he is able, with often small means, to turn any kind of space into a scene of drama. He has a very particularly subversive humor. Natalie came with the proposal to bring us together and indeed Cafe Parnas with its ultimate decorations is a perfect place for our first date. MT: We’ve actually known each other for a long time, but we haven’t held an exhibition together yet. I don't even really remember if we ever had a group exhibition together or exhibited together as a group. So, it was probably time to put on an exhibition together.

CH Your works often treat identity as something performed rather than fixed. Julie, your characters continuously shift between roles, voices and desires, while Mark, you use costume, gesture and cinematic staging to explore sexuality and historical memory. How did you develop a shared cast of figures for the exhibition, and where do your approaches converge or remain deliberately distinct?

JB & MT JB: We came quite quickly with the idea of becoming each other's double. Becoming someone's double embodies the shapeshifting practice that can allow you to reflect and simultaneously overcome your own identity as something fixed. Parnas brought the idea of Le Chat Noir, a 1920s cabaret where both literally and metaphorically, the smoke and the night allows for a blurriness of gender, sexuality, of predetermined roles. I think it underlines our common position of not being sure of what is authentic and what is performed, that brings uncertainty but also seduction and pleasure. I also think this uncertainty is crucial. MT: I don’t know about Julie Béna, but I think we had likely been waiting for a space like this—and that it was precisely this space that brought us together, connecting our atmospheres, our personalities, and our art at this exhibition titled “Le Chat Noir”.

CH Parnas carries traces of Prague’s bohemian, cinematic, jazz and underground cultures. Both of you frequently work with spaces shaped by past lives, forgotten stories and imagined histories. How did the building’s cultural memory enter the exhibition, and how did you balance historical research with fiction and invention?

JB & MT JB: Parnas already is a gesamtkunstwerk, its walls, bar, lamps, floor, almost all its surfaces are decorated. You immediately feel that it has its own long history, as if emanating from the walls. So our show is probably more a question of how to bring us and our narratives in this space and allow for a certain tension between us and the space to exist. In a certain manner the space becomes another double of our practice. This is what we tried to suggest with the first photoshooting of us in the space taken by Shotbyus. MTh: I am very glad that this space worked out, because that era—the 1920s and 30s—is closely linked to my work, my persona, and my family, so... It hasn't changed, because I’ve known this space for a long time—I’ve been seeking out places like this. I track them down using old photographs, films, and so on, so I’m very familiar with them. I can picture the context and history—for instance, there used to be a restaurant there. We actually shot our short videofilm there, too. That short videofilm was called “Merlot.” But of course I would like to see many wonderful people and their stories there and this took place in late-night cabarets, late-night restaurants, late-night cafes, late-night cinemas, nightclubs with tables featuring telephones with numbers, and so on. So a wealth of stories—stories that last forever.

CH Julie, glass, drawing and performance allow your characters to move between object, image and living presence. Mark, your drawings and films similarly use the body as a site of transformation, projection and historical tension. How did you each approach the body in Le Chat Noir, both as a physical form and as a surface onto which identities, memories and desires are projected?

JB & MT JB: Each of my new productions for Le Chat Noir : sculptures, drawings, laces, automaton, are characters inhabiting the space, each one in their specificities. The laces are eyes seeking your attention with their certainty and details. I am also super happy to show an automaton for the first time, something I have been dreaming about for years and working on since months. This premiere piece of my series of automatons (there will be three... more soon) is called The Magician and the Moon. And of course, I needed to be here somehow, bodily but without a word ( since the space is already speaking a lot for itself). So Jean, my last performed character, will pass by for the opening, but will also be continuously present in the exhibition space through a short portrait video. MT: As I said, Julie and I have known each other for a long time, but we’ve never exhibited together. I don't believe—or at least I don't recall—him ever showing up at any of the exhibitions I was at and it was actually the gallery—Kodl Contemporary—that came up with the idea for Julie and me to collaborate. And this idea and the possibility of building it out of granite. I didn't hesitate to say yes. Sure,it was a test of compromise and respect for the other person. But I think this Parnas space successfully brought together the distinct atmospheres of our personalities and our art. But let's also not forget that we are in a commercial resort and that puts both of us in a different position, too a little bit i guess.You know as the saying goes, we have to earn the money for that ham sometime, don't we?

CH Humour, seduction and unease coexist in both of your practices, often making it difficult to tell whether a scene is playful, threatening or melancholic. How did you work with this emotional ambiguity in Le Chat Noir, and what role does it play in drawing the audience into the exhibition’s fictional world?

JB & MT JB: The physical presence is a « le corp » of any performance and a central point in my work. To be in front of the public means really to be with the public, to actually break the wall. It is something totally different than to be on the image. For me theatre became nowadays the least theatrical precisely because it is not pretending to be authentic, but that it remains presence in front and with people. In performance all your senses are open and you can create extremely strong sensations in one word, one eye contact, one touch. We probably suggest the space as more performative as a our relation to it, as Parnas is a body in itself. MT: I wouldn’t know, wait...you know what, i can tell you just one thing about that. I’d like to show up there like Maria Callas—at age 100, not 102—and stand by the piano to try singing an aria. But no, they’d wheel her in, and she’d just look around, and after a while, she wouldn’t even ask where she actually was. I am sure Maria would be very happy there and i would too. Actually, one more thing. When I was answering these questions yesterday... and yesterday was September 16th, the day Maria died. That turned out well, didn't it?