ARTISTIC APPROACH
Véronique Bourlon sees photography and experimental cinema as a place for self-exploration: making room for what calls, following a sensation, letting the image do its work. A field opens up, through a drift. The gaze shifts; contours waver. Emotion moves through, without being reduced to words. Her gesture is to let a form emerge, with attention to fault lines, thresholds, and what slips away.
For a long time, this attention settled into plants and minerals, into textures shaped by sheen, transparency, and fluidity: often unidentifiable, open forms that give the viewer time to enter these mental landscapes. Today, it is anchored in a more direct reality: the family, an intimate “geography” of places, emotions, and tacit rules.
In parallel, her artist films, rooted in experimental cinema, extend photography: the image takes its time. It is edited, stretched, layered; it breathes, sometimes dissolving into black, then returning differently. Image, duration, and sound allow a more sensual, sometimes erotic charge to rise. Film shifts the experience, without breaking the thread of the gaze.
Photography and experimental cinema meet at this point of tension: close to the real, Véronique Bourlon welcomes unease; the uncanny slips in, quietly.
BIOGRAPHY
Véronique Bourlon is a visual artist. She lives and works in Paris. After a background in theatre (acting, dramaturgy and directing) and leading cultural projects, she has been developing since 2020 a visual language that brings together photography and film.
Her first series, The Flowers of Evil (2020), features tightly framed photographs of flowers, almost tracked down, where the organic becomes charged with ambivalence and troubled emotions. Noticed by 9 Lives magazine, the series led to a book published by Le Bec en l’air Editions, followed by a first presentation at New Galerie (Paris, 2020) and an exhibition at Le Salon dans la cour (Paris, 2021). In 2021, she developed Tropical Zone and When You’re Not There, two research series that extend the floral motif as a space for writing, in the service of the intimate.
In 2022, she made Lose Yourself with Me, her first experimental film. Built entirely from her own photographs, turned into living matter through superimpositions, entanglements and metamorphoses, the film relies on an organic, immersive soundtrack, shaping an emotional and sensual arc, shot through with women’s pleasure. The film was screened in 2022 at Les Nuits photo (Paris), Côté court Festival (Pantin), Festival du Regard (Cergy-Pontoise). In 2023, it screened at the International Women’s Film Festival (Créteil) and at the Cinémathèque Française (Paris), then at Rencontres Internationales Traverse (Toulouse) in 2024, and at On Stage Photography, Rencontres d’Arles (Off) in 2025.
Alongside this, she developed the series Summer Night’s Dreams (2023) and received the MPB & On Stage Photography Prize (Arles) in 2024 for this work. The same year, she created Ecstasies, an installation produced for the Promenades photographiques de Blois (2024). She also made The Kiss (2024), an artist’s film centred on the unsettling nature of desire between women. The film favours immersion and ellipsis, working through appearance and disappearance. Bodies remain absent, and the image is built around a constantly deferred expectation of the visible. The Kiss was screened in 2025 at Rencontres Internationales Traverse (Toulouse), Bogotá Experimental Film Festival (Colombia), and Paris Independent Film Festival (Paris).
In January 2026, she presented the first images from her ongoing work My Parents, or Queer Innocence at the group exhibition Aire de famille (Paris, 2026).
SCREENINGS
The Kiss
> Paris Independent Film Festival, Paris, 2025
> Bogotà Experimental Film Festival, Colombia, 2025
> Rencontres Internationales Traverse, Toulouse, 2025
Lose yourself with me
> On Stage Photography, Rencontres d'Arles, 2025
> Promenades photographiques, Blois, 2024
> Rencontres Internationales Traverse, Toulouse, 2024
> Cinémathèque Française, Paris, 2023
> Festival international de films de femmes, Créteil, 2023
> Festival du regard, Cergy-Pontoise, 2022
> Bloom Party, Montpellier, 2022
> Côté court Festival, Pantin, 2022
> The Holy Art Gallery, London, 2022
> Les Nuits photo, Paris, 2022
EXHIBITIONS
* group show
Aire de famille I My parents or queer innocence *
> Les Magasins généraux, Paris, 2026
De Moi à Soi [Autoportrait] *
> Le Pangolin, Marseille, 2024
Summer Night's Dreams
> On Stage Photography, Rencontres d'Arles, 2025 *
> Promenades photographiques, Blois, 2024
The Flowers of Evil
> Le Salon dans la cour, Paris, 2021
> New Galerie, Paris, 2020 *
INSTALLATION
Ecstasies
> Promenades photographiques, Blois, 2024
AWARD
Summer Night's Dreams
> Prix MPB & ON STAGE PHOTOGRAPHY, Arles, 2024
PUBLICATION
Les fleurs du mal, Le Bec en l'air Editions, 2020
PRESS ARTICLE
> Carte blanche to Marion Scemama : Véronique Bourlon, birth of a photographic gesture
9 Lives magazine, 2020
To be found here.