Dear Shaded Viewers,
2026 is shaping up to be an extraordinary year. Following a Fashion Week brimming with bold statements, let’s turn our attention to an artist who has risen above hatred to offer us a visceral call for tolerance. An irrepressible desire erupts into visual revelation: Jenna Marvin. Her latest exhibition is held at Transfo, a refugee shelter where contemporary artists stage exhibitions year-round.
Jenna Marvin is a 26-year-old artist who fled Russia as Putin intensified his discriminatory laws against the LGBT community. She arrived in Paris barely of legal age and has continued the vivid performances captured in the intimate documentary Queendom by Agniaa Galdanova The film chronicles her radical interventions in public spaces, including wrenching moments of violent public confrontations and familial incomprehension.
Titled Propaganda, the exhibition demonstrates how discriminatory legislation exerts unspeakable pressure on individuals. Excerpts from Putin’s laws follow us along the walls, setting an oppressive tone throughout. These meticulously constructed laws and reforms, implemented between 2013 and 2022, trap us in a psychological prison. The spaces feel uncanny: pitch black, striking red, or deep indigo that holds our breath. We are struck by these hues, which are in fact the young artist’s signature: drawing us into a mental landscape.
The young performer plunges us into a psychological space where the work exists independently of her presence. Wrapped bodies flicker on screens, swaddled mannequins stand sentinel in corners. These objects hold their own charge even when Jenna has left the room. The strapping becomes oddly captivating, placing her within the creative lineage of engaged artists who understand that art can outlive the gesture. Jenna claims expressionism as her heritage, but we also sense camp at play: an unapologetic superficiality that harbors a genuine fight. These tightly bound silhouettes redefine performance art by establishing an ergonomic bodily presence that persists beyond the live moment.
Black rooms present videos that function both as archive and experimentation. Bodies caress on screen, desires transcribed through new textures that hint at a legitimate and multidisciplinary career ahead. Upstairs, some document her earlier performances in Russia. This fusion of desire and contemporary media is a response to a pressing question: while halos and bodies offer an ethereal rendering of longing, progress is no utopia. Technology can unite, or fracture us further. Like Paul B. Preciado, Jenna warns of a totalitarianism reinforced by the very technologies that promise liberation.
She has also performed collaboratively, notably with Tata Jaxon. Two electrifying pieces where visceral violence is palpable. A final performance is scheduled for the exhibition’s closing day. Expect the unexpected: stark gestures set against classical music, exaggerated body parts. Jenna activates taped accessories (heels, horns) and transforms tape into an appropriationist gesture, far more explicit than Bertrand Lavier’s lacquered surfaces. Objects become second skin.
Don’t miss her final performance at Transfo on Saturday, December 7th, and stay tuned for new screenings of Queendom. In a society where even her posters were attacked at the Hôpital St Louis nearby, supporting creativity is a radical act of dignity.
Later,
Mael Heinz
