'Laure Prouvost: Oma-je' at PHI Foundation, Montreal, Canada
1 November 2024
From 1 November 2024 to 9 March 2025, The PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art presents 'Oma-je', the largest North American exhibition to date by acclaimed French artist Laure Prouvost.
This touring show has evolved from its 2023 iteration at Remai Modern in Saskatoon and will unfold 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.
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. The exhibition will feature 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).
Oma-je 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.
Image: Laure Prouvost, This Means, 2019, Glass, nailbrush, steel, pump, water, 203 x 180 x 180 cm © Laure Prouvost
