LOCATION: The prison at Landskrona Citadel. MAP . Buy festival tickets
Agnès Geoffray’s work combines staged photography and text to explore gestures of resistance—defiance, escape, and endurance—in the face of confinement.
Her images depict fictional female figures confronting or fleeing oppressive structures, while texts presented through projection or sound restore voices largely absent from official archives, particularly those of incarcerated young women. Together, image and text position writing as a form of emancipation.
Developed in collaboration with curator Vanessa Desclaux, the exhibition creates a dialogue between photographic, poetic, and archival materials. Historical documents from France and Sweden are shown alongside Geoffray’s works, highlighting the gap between institutional records and lived experience, and reflecting on how histories are constructed and whose perspectives are excluded.
Presented within the Landskrona Citadel, the exhibition takes on a site-specific dimension. The citadel once housed a forced labour institution for women imprisoned under the Vagrancy Act. Archival records reveal acts of resistance—escapes, protests, and conflicts with staff—often met with harsh punishment. Installed within the former prison cells, Geoffray’s photographs resonate with this history, allowing her fictional figures to inhabit and reactivate the space.
The exhibition also builds on research into French “preservation schools,” where girls deemed “deviant” were confined for behaviour that challenged social norms. Existing during the same period as the forced labour system for women in Landskrona, these institutions reveal parallel structures of control in France and Sweden. By placing these histories side by side, the exhibition reflects on mechanisms of confinement and moral regulation from both a poetic and political contemporary perspective.
An exhibition of works by Agnès Geoffray conceived in collaboration with Vanessa Desclaux
Curators: Vanessa Desclaux and Inga Linn Härdelin
The exhibition was initially produced by les Rencontres d’Arles, France and Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland.
Agnès Geoffray is a French artist whose work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at institutions including Rencontres d’Arles, Bozar in Brussels, Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthaus Zürich, Witte de With in Rotterdam, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, and MAC VAL.
Her works are included in several major public and private collections, including Centre Pompidou, CNAP, and MAC VAL. Several publications on her work have been released, most recently they stray they persist they thunder (Éditions Textuel, 2025), produced in conjunction with Rencontres d’Arles.
Photo: © Sebastien Reuze
Vanessa Desclaux is an independent curator and researcher. Until 2023, she was responsible for outreach and cultural programme at the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MECA in Bordeaux. She was a teacher in art history at the academy of Dijon from 2011 to 2019 and acquired a PhD in Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Previously she has worked at Tate Modern and at Bloomberg Space in London and she collaborated with many institutions including De Appel (Amsterdam), Le Frac Bourgogne (Dijon), La Galerie (Centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec) or Le Grand Palais in Paris.
Photo: © Agnès Geoffray
This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of Institut français
