Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska, the exhibition Theatre of Cruelty is rooted in, and takes its name from French artist Antonin Artaud’s (1896-1948) radical vision of experimental theatre. Formulated in the 1930s, Artaud’s theatre sought not to present polite fictions but to spiritually cleanse its audience by bypassing reason in favour of the body, the senses, and the extremes of emotion – like an exorcism or an ancient rite. For Artaud, “cruelty” was never mere shocking bloodshed, but a merciless intensity – a demand to confront existence in its rawness, its suffering, its ecstasy, and its mortal edge. In a world where pain is aestheticised and suffering is consumed as content, his call to tear aside the curtain and expose what lies beneath is more urgent than ever. 

In dialogue with works by Artaud, the exhibition gathers artists across generations and disciplines— Ed Atkins, Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard, Tobias Bradford, Romeo Castellucci, Pan Daijing, Tadeusz Kantor, Liza Lacroix, and Michel Nedjar. Through theatre, performance, sound, painting, sculpture, video, and kinetic installation, their works refuse narrative comfort, instead staging acts of exorcisms that unsettle and disturb, embodying existential melancholy, ruptured language, the force of gesture, and the primal energy Artaud imagined.