"ANNA & THE JESTER in Window of Opportunity", 2018.
17 min 37 sec, loop
What is it like to be infinite? In "Anna & The Jester in Window of Opportunity," we witness Julie Béna’s exploration of materiality and absence through a jester grappling with existentialism. Our bell-adorned protagonist navigates through a mostly deserted corporate terrain of steel and glass. She encounters a series of characters that pose intangible questions of embodiment, “Have you stretched your existence enough to help you solve your problem?” The perils of abstraction and concretism befall the jester at
every turn, inciting within the viewer the same baffling questions. We are left with a reminder to
remain opaque, as transparency can breed conformity.
"The Jester and Death", 2020
17 min 37 sec, loop
The Jester & Death is an installation and animation which sees the Jester (Béna’s avatar) and William Blake attend a drift-car race. The scene takes place in the Bunhill Fields cemetery; a 16th-18th Century former burial ground located near Kunstraum where nonconformists, radicals and dissenters are buried, holding the remains of John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniel Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and the poet and artist William Blake, among thousands of others.
