For this groundbreaking group show, imagined by Myriam Leroy, a dozen artists join forces to evoke the theme of cyberharassment, of which the author has been the target, like so many others – particularly those from minority communities.

In March 2024, a repentant member of a secret Facebook group sent their conversations to the journalist Myriam Leroy. Its name: “La Jupiler League du LOL”, a deliberate reference to the vast harassment affair known as “La Ligue du LOL” in France.

Leroy had access to 50 days of their conversations. Four men and one woman exchanged almost 4,300 messages. That’s 85 messages a day. The vast majority were about Myriam herself, while many others were about journalist Florence Hainaut and several well-known feminists. The main aim of this collaboration was to have supposedly compromising information about Myriam Leroy published in right-wing and far-right media, to coordinate attacks, to prepare the defense of one particular member’s harassment trial, and more generally, to let off steam. For example, joking about Myriam Leroy’s death, her sex life, exchanging her home address and commenting on her photos…

On the face of it, these individuals have nothing in common: neither generation (they’re between 40 and 65), nor activity, nor official political ideology. What keeps them together is a cause: the fight against what they call “neo-feminism” and its so-called excesses, which Leroy seems to embody in their eyes. In the course of their discussions, something akin to a conspiracy theory takes shape: that women are venal, evil, stupid and incompetent, and that they unduly occupy a place that should logically belong to these men. So, if the members of the “Jupiler League of LOL” aren’t as successful as they think they should be, it’s because they lie, scheme, network, bed, intrigue and deceive.

The author anonymised their exchanges and passed them on to a dozen artists whose work she admires. Not only women, but also cisgender men, as she believes that it’s time for men to take on a collective voice on gender-based violence. It’s not a question of appropriating a word or an experience, but of carrying the burden with them.

Through works as eclectic as each other, the artists invited by Leroy interpret, in their own way, the 4300 messages to which she has been subjected to, through painting, sculpture, stained glass, poetry, comic strips, bookbinding, embroidery and performance art. Some pay tribute to the ears that obsess her harassers, others highlight the absurdity of these exchanges through ridicule, or denounce the sexism inherent in these messages by warning about the seriousness of online harassment. Inspired by Myriam Leroy’s experience, the artists bring their work into conversation with one another, creating a poignant exhibition that acts as an outlet for the intellectual misery and moral despair of those who post these messages.

 © Elyse Galiano

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