“. . . leaps of imagination.”
French artist Laure Prouvost’s first Australian solo exhibition, Oui Move In You, showing at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne, renders subconscious family ties within sensations of movement, memory, and language.
Laure Prouvost, Above Front Tears Oui Float, 2022, installation view, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo. Photograph: Annar Bjørgli
Prouvost, born in the 1970s in northern France, has spent most of her career outside her country. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in the new millennium (then worked for artist John Latham, who she described as “more like a grandfather than my real grandfather”) and from Goldsmiths College in 2010. After winning the 2013 Turner Prize and representing France at the 2019 Venice Biennale, she secured an invite to the Biennale of Sydney in ill-fated 2020. Four years on, the currently Brussels-based artist has finally come to Australia via Melbourne.
Prouvost is less a Europe-to-Australia transplant for geographical access to a big international artist than someone creating worlds wherever she goes. With new commissions and past works, the artist’s mediums – mixed media installation, video, sculpture, and performance – create a representational and surreal architectural journey. As ACCA puts it, Oui Move In You is a “labyrinthine and other-worldly environment.”
Thinking back, Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany, the exhibition’s co-curator with Annika Kristensen, also shared, “The thing I remember most vividly when I first encountered Laure’s work was its sensory intensity, its fecundity, and the leaps of imagination.” This intensity is more atmospheric than fierce, though; Prouvost is tender and allusive at once. For instance, take the title of her Turner Prize work, Wantee, 2023 (also in the exhibition), imitating the friendly sound of “Want tea?” The multilingual artist also often fluidly twists Anglo and Francophone words and meanings, like in the exhibition’s title, Oui Move In You. An artist of play, she just loves puns, too.
Laure Prouvost, Wantee (detail), 2013, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels, carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid, Lisson Gallery, London/New York/Shanghai. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
Errors seep into her visuals as well. In Wantee, a video about her grandfather and exiled artist Kurt Schwitters, a home appears lived-in but abandoned. The artwork’s narrative feels misconstrued as if seen through the corporeal muddiness of childhood memory. With similar multisensory storytelling, the exhibition’s Every Sunday, Grand Ma, 2022, shows an older woman growing wings. Her leg kicks back as she goes above the clouds, smiling against a pastel blue sky. Love and relief for her release as we see her fly. Our senses then plunge to humour and sorrow as we remember that Prouvost blurs myth with reality; matriarchs are still victims of gravity.
Prouvost, slipping between our kin and us, pries out these palpable feelings. But, familial legacies in her work stay speculative rather than sentimental. Some themes – like displacement – require unsettling measures, like the quick cuts in her filmmaking. In the ACCA exhibition, Four For See Beauties, 2022, wet human bodies merge with sea life. Red lights grow our anxiety. But domestic comforts stay close with the installation of curtains, carpets, and cushions.
In an interview (2024, Moody Center for the Arts, USA), Prouvost said, “the visitor, we are the protagonist, we become the work,” and, in another interview (2021, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark), that “misunderstanding makes you use the imagination more.” Always, Prouvost remains gentle but enigmatic, and with Oui Move In You, we stay curious in the haze of our elders’ presence.
Tahney Fosdike is a writer from the Murraylands, South Australia, now living in a tiny Paris apartment.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
23 March to 10 June 2024
Melbourne
