Fury by Marie Quéau at Le Bal

How does one learn to fall, to jump out of a window, to break everything on cue? In Fury, Marie Quéau presents bodies confronted with extreme states.

Overview

Quéau points her camera onto stunt performers repeatedly thrown through windows, actors in trance within motion capture studios, freedivers in static immersion on the edge of drift, and individuals giving free rein to their rage in a fury room. In a world where logic slips away, the artist turns to poetic figures of reversal: the fall as the underside of flight; a body taking on the wound or accident in place of another; a state of trance converted into data by the machine; violence staged as a means of survival. Marie Quéau’s work invites us to question our own perception of reality. What if these moments of confrontation with our limits - when body and mind waver between control and surrender - revealed what binds us most intensely?

 “The title Fury came from David Fincher’s film Alien 3, and the name of the planet ‘Fury 161’ where the story takes place. At the very beginning of this project, I imagined that the characters I photographed lived on this prison planet, driven by extreme telluric forces. I kept Fury because I liked the energy the title conveyed. The Furies are also persecuting deities from Roman mythology, often found on funerary steles.” — Marie Quéau

LE BAL, located at 6 Impasse de la Défense, 75018 Paris, is open on Wednesdays from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Thursday to Sunday from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m., and closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

About The Artist

Marie Quéau was born in 1985 in Choisy-le-Roi. After studying visual arts, she joined the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, from which she graduated in 2009. Since 2017, she has lived and worked in Paris, following a residency at the Cité internationale des arts. Quéau explores the boundary between documentary and fiction: attentive to the descriptive dimension of her subjects, she always distances herself from it to reveal zones of uncertainty and ambiguity, drawing from both collective imagination and science fiction.

Her work has been presented in numerous institutions and festivals, including the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, the Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography, the Freiburg Cultural Center, La Filature in Mulhouse, Galerie Madé in Paris, as well as the PhotoLevallois Festival. Her projects have resulted in several publications: Handbook (September Books, 2018) is a poetic mapping of sites dedicated to scientific research; Odds and Ends (Area Books, 2021) explores the notion of the end as a process at work in the world around us; and Le Royaume (Aera Books, 2025) portrays an imaginary community. Her works are held in various collections such as the Frac Île-de-France, the French National Center for Visual Arts (Cnap), and the National Library of France. She is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris.