Fury
Fury brings together a new series by Marie Quéau, winner of the 5th LE BAL/ADAGP Prize for Young Creation. The work focuses on bodies confronted with extreme states: stunt performers repeatedly thrown through windows, actors in trance within motion capture studios, freedivers in static immersion on the edge of drift, individuals giving free rein to their rage in a fury room. Through these settings, Quéau's work invites us to question our own perception of reality and what moments of confrontation with our limits—when body and mind waver between control and surrender—reveal about what binds us most intensely.
Marie Quéau (b. 1985, Choisy-le-Roi, France) studied art history at the Sorbonne before attending the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, graduating in 2009. She has lived and worked in Paris since her residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in 2017. Her practice explores the human body pushed to its limits, documenting extreme physical and psychological states with precision and poetic restraint. The title Fury came from David Fincher's film Alien 3 and the name of the planet "Fury 161" where the story takes place—at the very beginning of this project, Quéau imagined that the characters she photographed lived on this prison-planet, driven by extreme telluric forces.
This 140-page publication features text by Guillaume Blanc-Marianne and design by Roger Willems, published in conjunction with Quéau's exhibition at LE BAL (November 28, 2025 – February 8, 2026). The €20,000 LE BAL/ADAGP Prize for Young Creation is open to photographers and video artists under 40 living in France, recognizing emerging talent in contemporary visual arts. Quéau has pursued a personal approach while occasionally working on commissions for sports magazines such as L'Équipe and Entorse Magazine, bringing an athlete's understanding of physical extremes to her art practice.
Quéau's previous work has received significant recognition, including the 2012 Nofound Photo Fair/de Groot Foundation Prize for her series Gojira, the 2017 CNAP creation grants for contemporary documentary photography, and the 2018 Carré sur Seine Prize for Odds and Ends, which was also named among the finalists for the HSBC Photography Prize. Her work has been exhibited at PhotoLevallois Festival, Salon de Montrouge, International Festival of Fashion and Photography in Hyères, and various museums and institutions across France.