Laure Prouvost's Venice Biennale installation presented at LaM Lille alongside the Museum's collection
8 January 2021
In a solo exhibition at Lille's Métropole Musée d'art moderne (LaM), Laure Prouvost revisits her major 2019 installation ‘Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre’. First presented at the 58th Venice Biennale for the French Pavilion, and since shown at Les Abbatoirs in Toulouse, this is the third and final stop on the exhibition's tour. In this iteration, Prouvost presents the chance to rediscover the work amongst 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 – 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 central video component, 2019 film They Parlaient 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 melée 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.”
'Deep See Bluve Surrounding You / Vois ce bleu profond te fondre' continues at LaM until 3 October 2021, and will then travel to the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Find further details on the exhibition here.
