In Propaganda, the Russian artist Jenna Marvin, a refugee in France, turns the tools of Vladimir Putin’s regime against him. A radical exhibition to see in Paris until February 7.
From her body, Jenna Marvin has made a tool of visual sabotage against the propaganda of Vladimir Putin’s regime. Revealed in 2023 by the documentary Queendom, the 26-year-old Russian performer appeared there wandering in public space in Russia under the hostile gaze of passersby and police… A resistance illustrated in Propaganda, her first exhibition in France, shown until February 7 at Transfo – Emmaüs Solidarité.
Now a refugee in France, the performer continues this work at the edge of contemporary art, performance and activism. She has made her body a surface for political projection and a living archive of systemic violence. With her horrifically dramatic drag looks, her clownish creature short-circuits the dominant narratives, questioning norms of gender, beauty and respectability. Jenna Marvin works with collage, sculpture, and video, but focuses above all on movement. Everything passes through the flesh, pain, endurance, and transformation.
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Confronting Our Powerlessness
The title of the show sets the tone: here, propaganda is no longer the weapon of the Russian state but that of an artist who claims the contamination of imaginaries. Photographs, videos, installations and performances converse with a political context materialized by extracts pasted on the walls of laws in Russia hardening the state’s homophobia.
On January 22, Propaganda took on an even more tangible dimension with the performance STOP. DON’T LOVE in collaboration with artist Tata Jaxon, which transfigured the cultural center into a terrifying landscape. Watched from a glass ceiling by an impotent audience, the two artists illustrated the full ambiguity of queer survival under an authoritarian regime, looking up, seeking the gaze, almost begging… Awe, distance, depersonalization: a way for Jenna Marvin to confront Western audiences with what state propaganda produces.
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