ART-PRESENTATION: Laure Prouvost AM-BIG-YOU-US LEGSICON
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: M HKA Archive
The exhibition “AM-BIG-YOU-US LEGSICON” is the largest organised to date on the practice of artist Laure Prouvost. Offering a wide-angle panorama of Provoust’s career, ranging from a key selection of her formative “monologue” video works, through to recent major installations, the exhibition seeks to portray the work of an artist developing complex thought through artistic languages. The exhibition presents a substantial body of work by Prouvost, emphasising the web of ideas the artist develops for considering the complex state of mental life. Her practice has deep resonance to the significant contributions of mid-20th philosophy and psychoanalysis. This includes the work of pioneers in Object Relations Theory, such as psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who considered core aspects of human intellectual and emotional development, as manifested through our relations to objects and the external world. Affinities can also be found with the philosophical writings of Simone de Beauvoir, particularly on the need to acknowledge our fundamental ‘ambiguity’ as humans as a way to find freedom. Prouvost’s work similarly seeks to locate primordial conditions of the human subject at the breakdown of meaning located between the modernistic binaries of nature and culture, intuition and rationality. Including new works produced by the artist, the exhibition is a total environment emphasising the experimental, layered and intuitive aspects of the artist’s practice to date. It will offer a key moment to reflect on the practice of somebody considered one of the most original artists of her generation. Works by Prouvost are also presented at Antwerp’s renowned Café Strange for the duration of the exhibition. In 2019, she will represent France at the 58th Biennale of Venice. In March Laure Prouvost will open Performatik19, the Brussels biënnale for performance art, with the performance “They are waiting for you”, in collaboration with Sam Belinfante and Pierre Droulers. The performance is rooted in her Prouvot’s film “Dit Learn” (2017), in which a quick succession of everyday objects, images and texts encourages you to imbue everything with new meaning
Info: Curator: Nav Haq, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), Leuvenstraat 32, Antwerp, Duration: 8/2-19/5/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.muhka.be and Café Strange, Dambruggestraat 161, Antwerp, Duration: : 8/2-19/5/19, Days & Hours:Tue-Sun 19:00-02:00, www.cafe-strange.be
