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
Visual artist, Véronique Bourlon lives and works in Paris.
Being a playwright and director for ten years, she began coordinating artistic projects and managing french cultural structures in 1996. In parallel to her career, she never stops writing. Since 2020, she has been pursuing her artistic practice and focusing on visual writing through the medium of photography.
Her series, Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), born during the first lockdown, shows photographs of flowers framed as tightly as possible, as if they were being stalked. Noticed by 9 Lives magazine in the spring of 2020, she published a book with Bec en l'air Editions. An exhibition was held in 2020 in Paris, at New Galerie, then in 2021 at the Salon dans la cour.
She continued with two photographic series, pursuing her exploration of the floral motif, which she links to the intimate, in 2021, with Zone tropicale (Tropical Zone) and En ton absence (When you're not there).
She then works at the crossroads of photography and experimental cinema, using her images of flowers as living material. Lose Yourself With Me is her first film. It has been screened at the Nuits photo in Paris, at the Holy Art Gallery in London, at the Côté court festival in Pantin and at the Festival du regard in Cergy-Pontoise in 2022, at the Festival international de Films de femmes de Créteil, at the Cinémathèque française in 2023, at Rencontres Internationales Traverse in Toulouse, in 2024 and at Rencontres d'Arles with On Stage Photography in 2025.
She is continuing her photographic work with a new serie, Summer Night'S Dreams, in 2023 - the changeover of urban parks at nightfall, when people and nature dissolve into the archaic fears of the night - and she presents two other projects.
The first is The Kiss, a new experimental film about the troubled state of desire between women in a blurred temporality, which was first shown at the Rencontres internationales Traverse in Toulouse, at the Bogotà Experimental Film Festival, then at the Paris Independent Film Festival in 2025. And Ecstasies, a 'floral' installation specially created for the Promenades photographiques de Blois in the summer of 2024, at the Pavillon Anne de Bretagne.
In the summer of 2025, she participated in two screenings organized by On Stage Photography at the Rencontres d'Arles.
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.