For the 2022 Printemps de l’art contemporain (PAC) in Marseille, sissi club is offering curator Thomas Conchou carte blanche. He presents a dual exhibition featuring Josefin Arnell, a Swedish artist based in Amsterdam, and Marilou Bal, a French artist living and working in Geneva, who has never had a solo exhibition in France.

The debut feature film by Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, *The Lure* (*Córki Dancingu*), won an award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016. It depicts the earthly adventure of two mermaid sisters, Gold and Silver, deftly navigating between the genres of horror and musical comedy. A reinterpretation of the myth of the Little Mermaid, now turned cannibal, The Lure offers a commentary on adolescence and the construction of femininity. While one of the sisters grapples with the vicissitudes of romantic love and sexual desire, the other battles her urge to devour as they are drawn into the seedy, mafia-infested world of Polish nightclubs. The film employs a color palette saturated with greenish tones against a Europop backdrop, and remains throughout on the narrow ridge that links seduction and predation, sensuality and monstrosity, passion and impulse, burlesque and grotesque.

These are themes that also connect the works of Josefin Arnell and Marilou Bal. One a video artist, the other a painter, they both adopt the perspective of adolescence to untangle the practices of femininity from their normalizing and misogynistic imperatives. It is within this complex and dense space of identity affirmation and sensual experimentation that they encounter the characters who inhabit their works, and it is from this space that the dialogue of their two-person exhibition will take shape at sissi club. The exhibition presents a series of new paintings by Marilou Bal alongside an installation centered around Josefin Arnell’s film *Wild Filly Story* (2020).