PREVIEW: Laure Prouvost- Oma-je
Laure Prouvost is an artist who makes complex installations involving video works characterised by layered stories, surreal humour and wordplay. The artist’s concern is with penetration of unknown worlds, escape from everyday life, and the conscious loss of the self in the hope of ultimately finding one’s way back to it again.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: PHI Foundation Archive
Laure Prouvost is known for her playful use of language, translation and transliteration, experimental narrated video, and immersive, surprising installations that transport visitors into unfamiliar worlds created largely from everyday objects. Her touring exhibition “Oma-je” has evolved from its 2023 iteration at Remai Modern in Saskatoon and unfolds as a journey across seven of the PHI Foundation’s galleries in Montréal. This immersive presentation celebrates Prouvost’s relationship to family, friends, and their loved ones, as well as inspirational thinkers, activists, chosen kin, and artistic predecessors. Oma-je honours both intellectual inheritance and embodied ways of knowing, shifting attention from grandfather to grandmother and forefather to foremother. Love, touch, and teaching are irreversibly entangled and celebrated. The exhibition celebrates, references, or features exceptional figures such as Louise Bourgeois, Hélène Cixous, Marie Curie, Mia Haazen, Omas Gegen Rechts, Joan Jonas, Hilma af Klint, Gulli Kinnby, Eleni Kritou, Denise Lefebvre, Audre Lorde, Ada Lovelace, Liz Magor, Ann Newdigate, Rosetta Nuotatore, Emmeline Pankhurst, Niki de Saint Phalle, Éliane Radigue, Odette Prouvost Leclercq, Felicita de la Rosa, Elisabeth Schimana, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, Barbara Steveni, Eugenie Tautoonie Kabluitok, and Agnès Varda, amongst more than 100 others. The exhibition features iconic pieces by Prouvost such as “Wantee” (2013), “Grandma’s Dream” (2013), “This Means” (2019), “Four For See Beauties” (2022), and “Every Sunday, Grand Ma” (2022). The exhibition also includes an enveloping new work titled “Here Her Heart Hovers” (2023), which has been co-commissioned by Remai Modern, Kunsthalle Wien, and Wiener Festwochen. This installation focuses on the figure of the grandmother as both ancestor and trailblazer, transforming the gallery into a theatre of objects relating to memory, imagination, and inheritance. Visitors are invited to travel through time and lose themselves in the dark, complex play between past and present, individual and society, and between modern and ancient concepts, relationships, materials, and techniques. There are three recent films embedded in “Here Her Heart Hovers”. In “You, My, Omma, Mama” (2023), nine women call out into the French coastal landscape for their grandmothers. Together, the circle of friends ventures into a cave where they reflect on potent memories of their oma, nonna, granny, bobo, babushka, halmeoni, and yaya, with personal and evocative objects in hand. A child performs a shadow play for Great Grandma, the magic oma in “Shadow Does” (2023). The story told offers exciting, heartwarming, and alarming details about the contemporary world. A “Walking Story” (2023) brings the nine women from “You, My, Omma, Mama”, back together around a campfire where their pithy reflections, like incantations, evoke memories of extraordinary foremothers who were drivers of social progress, equality, artistic innovation, and scientific discovery. They call upon us to keep our hearts and minds open so that we can continue to give and receive from a flow of shared knowledge and experience.
Photo: Laure Prouvost, This Means, 2019. Glass, nailbrush, steel, pump, water, 203 x 180 x 180 cm. Courtesy the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid. Photo: Trevor Good / carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid
Info: Curators: Aileen Burns and Cheryl Sim, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, 451 & 465, Saint-Jean Street, Montréal, Quebec, Canada, Duration: 11/11/2024-3/3/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://phi.ca/
