In June 2025, Bruno Aveillan and Nicolas Bary, who initiated the project, were granted exceptional access to the Naruto beya, the stable of master Kotoōshū Katsunori, following the wrestlers as closely as possible through the intensity of their daily lives.
Born of this rare immersion, the exhibition Sumo, forces sacrées offers a contemporary and sensitive reading of sumo, far from representations that reduce it to physical power alone. Through Bruno Aveillan’s gaze, this thousand-year-old tradition is revealed as an art of the body, ritual, and presence, where combat becomes form, rhythm, tension, and almost writing.
Between harshness and grace, the collision of bodies and ritual, extreme discipline and interiority, his photographs reveal a previously unseen sumo, at once sculptural, symbolic, and deeply human. Far from any folkloric approach, they unfold a contemporary visual vision in which the image becomes an imprint, between flesh and light, and in which the body asserts itself as living matter, traversed by a spiritual and metaphysical dimension.
Presented at the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris from June 9 to September 26, 2026, the exhibition is part of an artistic program devoted to sumo. As the arrival of wrestlers in France in June 2026 will mark a major moment for the visibility of this discipline, Sumo, forces sacrées is set to be a major cultural event, at the crossroads of contemporary art, photography, and the dialogue between France and Japan.
In the intimacy of the dohyō, I perceived an invisible language: a writing of the body made of codified gestures, immutable rituals, inhabited silences, and suspended breaths.
“The life of a rikishi unfolds according to a constant polarity. In the morning, training imposes an extreme, almost archaic intensity on the bodies, where violence, pain, and self-denial are intertwined. The afternoon opens onto another time: one of care, rest, stretching, meditation, and ritual. It is within this tension between power and surrender that I sought to inscribe my gaze.
Sumo appeared to me as a theater of paradoxes, where impact coexists with restraint, mass with elevation, brutality with an unexpected grace. This photographic series explores precisely that space: between the raw and the sublime, between flesh and light, sometimes reaching abstraction.” Bruno Aveillan
Bruno Aveillan is a French visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose work unfolds at the intersection of film, photography, and installation. Traversed by notions of memory, erasure, and presence, his work develops a singular visual language, in which light, time, and the emotional intensity of places become creative material.
Revealed internationally through his films for major houses such as Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Shangri-La, and Perrier, he has established himself through an immediately identifiable formal language, at once sensory, cinematic, and poetic. His career has been honored with more than 320 international awards, including numerous Cannes Lions, Clio Awards, D&AD, LIA, and Epica. His film L’Odyssée de Cartier, premiered at MoMA, notably received more than forty international distinctions.
Alongside this recognition in the field of film, Bruno Aveillan pursues a personal visual-art practice, exhibited in numerous institutions and events in Europe, Asia, and the United States, including the MAMM (with the support of the Institut français), the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, the Barnes Foundation, the Fundación Mapfre, the West Bund Art Center in Shanghai, as well as fairs such as Art Paris, BAD+, and Cutlog New York. His works have entered several collections, including those of the Musée Rodin, the Musée d’art contemporain Hyacinthe Rigaud, and the Auer Ory Foundation for Photography.
It should be noted that the exhibition Sumo, forces sacrées will also give rise to the publication of a book edited by Éditions NOIR, to be released on the occasion of Paris Photo 2026.
Bruno Aveillan : Sumo, Forces Sacrées
from June 9 to September 26, 2026
Maison de la culture du Japon
101 bis Quai Jacques Chirac
75015 Paris, France
https://www.mcjp.fr/
