Credit: Casino Luxembourg - Forum d’Art Contemporain
The Casino Luxembourg - Forum d’Art Contemporain in Luxembourg -Ville has announced it will present Theatre of Cruelty, a collective exhibition that explores the radical legacy of the French experimental theatre practitioner Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) until Sunday 8 February 2026.
Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska, the exhibition brings together works by Ed Atkins, Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard, Tobias Bradford, Romeo Castellucci, Pan Daijing, Tadeusz Kantor, Liza Lacroix and Michel Nedjar, highlighting the enduring relevance of Artaud’s vision in modern art.
Casino Luxembourg said the exhibition seeks to evoke a paroxysmal theatricality across multiple media, creating an immersive environment in which body, mind and emotion confront extremes. Visitors will encounter raw intensity, with bodies depicted as convulsing and transforming, gestures forming meaning beyond language and absurd repetition giving rise to a state of trance.
According to Casino Luxembourg, the exhibition deliberately refuses narrative comfort, instead offering a space where cruelty, tragedy, and ecstasy are experienced as cyclical and transformative forces. It draws on Artaud’s concept of “cruelty”, conceived in the 1930s as a means to bypass reason in favour of sensory and emotional intensity, the exhibition frames both historical and contemporary perspectives.
The exhibition includes rarely exhibited drawings and journals by Artaud, produced during his psychiatric hospital stays, alongside contemporary works that extend his ideas. These include Pan Daijing’s large-scale chalk-and-acrylic paintings Cream Cut 1 and Cream Cut 2 (2024–2025), which document performers’ physical and psychological states; Tadeusz Kantor’s bio-objects and stage machines, echoing themes of mortality and absurdity; and Liza Lacroix’s oil paintings, evoking corporeal violence and ritualistic gestures.
Performance and video works also feature, with Tobias Bradford’s kinetic sculpture Restless (2019) confronting viewers with a fragmented, absurd body, while Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia (2002–2004) presents an ongoing video documentation of a theatre cycle that juxtaposes cruelty, innocence and violence. Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard’s installation Take Half, I Have Nothing Left (2025) enacts a dystopian world of collapse and absurdity, reflecting Artaud’s rejection of societal masks and systems, and Ed Atkins’ Pianoworks 2 (2024) features a digital double performing a minimalist composition, emphasising the tension between human vulnerability and mechanised form, reminiscent of Artaud’s concept of the actor as an intensified double.
The exhibition space itself has been transformed into an immersive environment, with heavy black curtains breaking traditional theatrical boundaries and inviting visitors to move through the installation as participants rather than spectators.
