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RESIDENCIES
July-December 2025         Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berline (DE)
September-November 2024     Cité Internationale des Arst Paris (FR)
December 2023/Februar 2024     ArtMix residency in neimënster and Stadtgalerie                         Saarbrücken (LU/DE)
November 2020             residency The Lab Program in Mexico City    (MX)
December 2020             residency imGrafenhag in Winterthur (CH)

PUBLICATIONS

2023 mud and the bros, Lemon Press Zurich
2022 Woven in Vegetal Fabric: On Plant Becomings (LU)
2021 embodying worm, Master Thesis ZHdK (CH)
2020 human worm, self-published, The Lab Program (MX)

PRIZES & GRANTS
2024 Carte Blanche, Theater Kaleidoskop (LU)
2022 Akademiepreis AdBK Nürnberg (DE)
2022 Bourse Auguste van Werveke-Hanno (LU)
2020 ZHdK-AVINA Projektfonds für Studierende (CH)

STATEMENT

Noé Duboutay (he/they) is a visual artist based in Berlin and Luxembourg.

Noé performs, writes, and makes installations and objects. His practice draws on
historical and fictional narratives, borrowing imagery and language from different eras and translating research and personal experiences into text, objects, and performance.

Noé approaches queer historiography not as a definitive account, but as a
speculative, embodied practice – an attempt to seek out what and who have been
silenced, overlooked, and systematically erased. The trans body is always present, even when invisible. The works seek to blur the boundaries of heavily defined concepts, such as knight, hero, and Man, fantasizing them as mutable, queer, and soft. Non-human and animal-like beings often represent personal worlds of experience, and the materials used are a direct reference to the narratives.

Their work draws from experiences in/with a transmasculine body to question and
navigate societal implications of masculinity, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, amongst others. The work takes a political stance, pushing back against the rise of fascism and its nostalgic fantasy of a fixed, hierarchical past. As much as it is a critique, Noé’s work also seeks queer allyship and kinship – with a focus on vulnerability as a form of resistance and connection.

Born and raised in Luxembourg, Noé graduated in 2019 from HBKsaar with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts, 2021 with a Master of Fine Arts from ZHdK, and  they have finished their performance studies in Live Art Forms at AdBK Nürnberg in 2023. Noé won the Akademiepreis AdBK Nürnberg in 2022 and received the Bourse Auguste van Werveke-Hanno the same year. In 2023, Noé published his first literary publication, “mud and the bros” with Lemon Press Zurich. In 2024 Noé was the laureate of the residency at the Cité internationale des Arts, in Paris. This year Noé did a six-month residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.


About:
« it is our hearts, the lines we break » (2024)
aluminium sheets, hammered, 100x60 cm

Quotations are hammered into aluminum sheeting in a font inspired by the
13th century. The sentences come from stories about Silence. ‚Le Roman de
Silence‘ is a French romance story from the 13th Century. Silence is the hero of the story and embodies exemplary male roles in society, such as minstrel, knight, heir and revered pretty boy. However, Silence was assigned female at birth, which is revealed in the end. The excerpts from the original text, translations, and retellings hammered onto aluminum sheets here take up the queer side of the story. Even if „queer“ was not yet a term at the time, the narrative of Silence serves the queer historiography and the visibility of queer and trans people. Silence struggles with their own gender identity, and their desire for the queen. In it is our hearts, the lines we break the non-linear mixing of temporal clues (material, language, writing, source of citations), the story of Silence becomes part and method of a larger weaving of trans lineages.