French artist Camille Henrot finds tenderness and sensuality in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

More than once during a screening of French artist Camille Henrot’s film, Tuesday at König Galerie in Berlin, the unmistakable sharp intake of breath that accompanies stifled laughter could be heard. It’s not that the film is funny exactly (not at all in fact), but it presents the competitive world of martial arts in such an unexpected and sensual light that some viewers reacted surprisingly to the tender, slow, even romantic representation of male bodies on screen. The twenty-minute-long film focuses on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighters wrestling each other. While the sport is commonly associated with extreme displays of strength and determination, built around its focus on ‘ground fighting’ or grappling, Henrot’s lens magnifies the excessive intensity and closeness of the body, hinged on her desire to make a film that would be “sugar for the eyes.”

“I was thinking of [feminist film theorist] Laura Mulvey’s analysis of how images of women are often associated with slow motion (and the eroticisation of bodies),” the artist, who was awarded the Silver Lion for her video Grosse Fatigue at the 2013 Venice Biennale, tells SLEEK. “There is something masochistic in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: the way the fighters brag of their near death experience and their ‘cauliflower ears’, the way they enjoy the strength of the embrace. Tuesday transforms the search for efficiency and strength into an exaggerated, obsessive visual pleasure.” Through long, contemplative sequences, set to a compelling ambient electro soundtrack where breathing is often emphasised, Henrot’s film casts the viewer’s attention toward the dewy drops of sweat on a forehead, for example, or the intimacy of a mouth against an ear, where you can almost hear the whistle of breath, or the dance of bodies tumbling across the floor in slow motion. This is martial arts as you’ve never seen it before.

Henrot, who is currently working towards two solo shows at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and The National Gallery of Victoria, juxtaposes the scenes of the fighters with equally poetic close-ups of thoroughbred horses, carefully groomed and prepared for a race. Here, Henrot zooms in on a horse’s eye, bestowing the creature with human-like emotion and feeling; other shots, track the gentle slide of foam glistening on the animal’s smooth hair as it is washed by its owner. Often, these equine sequences are mirrored by the images of the fighters: the intricate plaiting of the horse’s mane is matched by the careful tying of the fighter’s belt; the beads of sweat on a balding competitor’s head intensified by the splash of soapy water on the horse’s back.

The pairing of horse racing with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is not random, however, but a conscious choice by the artist intended to question concepts surrounding power, valour and contest. “Horse racing and martial arts are the most direct and archaic manifestation of power and competition functioning in a very binary way. It all comes down to: who is the fastest and who is the strongest,” explains Henrot. “It is a primal form of war that is socially accepted in our ordinary lives as a game. The idea for Tuesday was not to challenge the traditional representation of power but rather to show the effect of the eroticisation of these archetypes and how the whole concept of binary conflict collapses in the process.”

The film’s focus on power and competition has its roots in its name. In latin, ‘Tuesday’ translates to “day of Mars”— the day dedicated to the god of war. Since ancient times, the second day of the week has been associated with qualities related to victory, strength and vigour. Interestingly, Henrot’s film is only one element in a much larger inquiry related to the meanings we ascribe to the days of the week (and to systems in general in her work). Tuesday was first presented at her solo exhibition, Days Are Dogs, which investigated the semantics of the seven day cycle, at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo from 2017-18. Henrot says that this grew from a desire to challenge the concept of the week, “the most banal structure — so banal in fact that it is never questioned.” Instead, through a series of elaborate installations, videos and sculpture, she explored its status as an arbitrary construct of governance. “The week is a repetitive unit of time, both reassuring in its predictability and disquieting in its creation of obligations,” notes Henrot.

Accompanying Tuesday are two strange sculptures: Wait What — a bronze creature mounted atop a wooden Greek column — and Defeated, a chrome humanoid shape wrestling with a pillowed form. The sculptures, drained and draped, and suspended limply in action, illustrate the crux of what Henrot is trying to convey in Tuesday: the moment of struggle, rather than the victory — neither the fighting sequences or the horse racing scenes depict the actual moment of winning. Instead, Henrot is fascinated by the exhausted body, the loss of breath, “the paralysis that the struggle creates.” Competition is reduced to the instance of stillness, before something is about to happen. Or as she puts it, “when one opposing force meets the other in some kind of equilibrium, the pressure against another pressure, resulting into a live sculpture of two bodies intertwined.”

Tuesday runs through to 26 May at König Galerie, Berlin.