Laure Prouvost's largest exhibition to date opens at M HKA in Antwerp
7 February 2019
On view at M HKA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp from 8 February - 19 May, 2019, 'AM-BIG-YOU-US LEGISCON' will be the largest exhibition 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 will seek to portray the work of an artist developing complex thought through artistic languages. This museum survey will delve into the philosophical depths of Prouvost’s work, and will consider the notion of the pre-verbal, as well as its incompatibility with the verbal.The exhibition will present 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.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication, co-published by M HKA and Book Works. Titled LEGSICON the publication will function as a dictionary, listing and expanding on the many key notions and symbols in Prouvost’s work.
For more information, and to plan your visit click here.
Image: The Wanderer, The Wet Sequence (video still), 2017 © Laure Prouvost
