Laure Prouvost's 2019 Venice Biennale installation travels to LaM, Lille
3 November 2020
This Autumn through 21 March 2021, Laure Prouvost revisits her major installation Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre in collaboration with Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art. Shown at last year’s Venice Biennale for the French Pavilion, Prouvost presents the chance to rediscover the work alongside the LaM's extensive collection of modern and contemporary art, the sensory emphasis of her visual and conceptual language resonating with the museum’s focus on art brut.
In keeping with her playful and highly personal practice, Prouvost goes back to her hometown to place her work in dialogue with a rich collection that marked her formative years. The immersive installation maps her idiosyncratic universe onto the museum’s sprawling spaces, mining the crossroads of fiction and autofiction; eroticism; the earthly; the material and the ephemeral; and the slipperiness of language as a way to know the world.
Transported from the labyrinthine waterways of Venice, Prouvost's work submerges the museum in a fluid and tentacular environment. The installation's central component, video work They Parleiant Idéale, invites its viewer on an epic journey through France, accompanied by a diverse crew of performing characters, whilst the part-familiar, part-fantasy world spills out of the screen in the form of strewn objects and ephemera, both found and exquisitely crafted. In the melee of digital moving image, artisan craft and organic matter, Prouvost's motif of the octopus “represents that animal and physical connection that we have lost." The artist explains: "We are several protagonists in this video and the tentacles connect us to each other, mixing our personalities and our various cultures.”
LaM is temporarily closed due to COVID-19 restrictions. Further details on the exhibition can be found via LaM.
Installation view of Laure Prouvost at LaM. Courtesy LaM; photography Nicolas Dewitte.
