fbpx Laure Prouvost | CIRCA

Language – in its broadest sense – permeates the video, sound, installation and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that combine film and installation in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images and meaning. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex film installations that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality. At once seductive and jarring, her approach to filmmaking employs layered storytelling, quick edits, montage and wordplay and is composed of a rich, tactile assortment of images, sounds, spoken and written phrases. The videos are often shown within immersive environments which comprise found objects, sculptures, painting and drawings, signs, furniture and architectural assemblages, that are rendered complicit within the overarching narrative of the installation.

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France (1978) and is currently based in Brussels. She received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Programme. Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013.

Circa Commissions

Rianna Jade Parker in Conversation With Laure Prouvost

Turner Prize winning conceptual artist Laure Prouvost talks to critic and curator Rianna Jade Parker on the eve of her October commission ‘No More Front Tears’ launching for CIRCA 2022. Connecting over Zoom – with Laure in her studio in Antwerp, Brussels and Rianna in Kingston, Jamaica – they discuss the medium of public art, migration memories and Laure’s enduring fascination with the octopus.

Rianna Jade Parker: With your new video work No More Front Tears for CIRCA, do you feel like you’re responding to a personal or global situation?

Laure Prouvost: It’s a bit of both, I mean, the screen, the scale and the size and the directness of it. I wanted something that could be as direct as it’s meant to be. I didn’t want to subvert what it’s made for. But to use it as a billboard, as propaganda, as adverts in the way advertising does. And this video, the whole thing talks a lot about migrations, movement, human, nonhuman, other than humans.

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