Long before passports, borders and nation states, birds crossed continents following invisible routes through the sky. Seeds travelled on the wind. Rivers carried sediments across territories that had yet to be named. Ocean currents moved creatures between distant worlds. Life has always existed through movement.

For her CIRCA commission No More Front Tears, Laure Prouvost invites us to imagine migration not as an exception, but as a fundamental condition of existence. Broadcasting globally throughout October 2022, the work emerges at a moment when debates around borders, displacement and belonging have become increasingly defined by exclusion. Rather than responding through the language of policy or ideology, Prouvost approaches these questions through poetry, empathy and speculation, asking what might happen if we imagined ourselves not as citizens of nations, but as participants in a larger ecology of movement shared by humans and other-than-humans alike.

Throughout her practice, Prouvost has consistently unsettled fixed categories. Languages slip and mutate. Objects acquire agency. Stories lose their origins and reappear elsewhere transformed. Meaning itself becomes migratory. Born in France, educated in London and now based in Brussels, she has long approached identity as something fluid and relational rather than stable or singular. In No More Front Tears, this sensibility expands beyond the human world, proposing forms of solidarity that extend across species, bodies and environments.

At the centre of the commission is a recurring proposition: could we become birds, free to follow our own migration routes? Could we become sea creatures navigating oceans through touch rather than territory? Could we imagine forms of belonging not determined by ownership, citizenship or control, but by connection and coexistence?

The figure that carries these questions is the octopus, a creature that has occupied a central place within Prouvost’s imagination for several years. Unlike the traditional image of intelligence as something located within a single controlling mind, the octopus offers another model. Its nervous system is distributed throughout its body. Thought occurs through movement, sensation and contact. Intelligence is shared rather than centralised. For Prouvost, the octopus becomes a way of imagining collective existence itself: a being whose knowledge emerges through relation.

This vision extends beyond the screen and into public space through the artist’s first augmented reality intervention. Appearing around the Anteros statue in Piccadilly Circus, a giant painterly octopus arrives after a long journey, resting at the heart of London following a protest march alongside a gathering of other-than-human companions. The scene is humorous, absurd and strangely moving. Yet beneath its playfulness lies a serious proposition. The octopus has travelled not to conquer territory but to imagine new forms of togetherness. Its placards and banners suggest a demonstration for futures that have not yet been written.

The title itself embodies Prouvost’s characteristic manipulation of language. No More Front Tears folds together frontier and tears, transforming political borders into emotional wounds. The phrase carries both hope and impossibility. It dreams of a world without separation while acknowledging the pain that borders continue to produce. Like much of Prouvost’s work, it exists somewhere between a slogan, a poem and a misunderstanding. It asks to be felt before it is fully understood.

Presented during Frieze Week and coinciding with CIRCA’s second anniversary, No More Front Tears transforms some of the world’s most visible advertising screens into temporary sites of imagination. Across London, Berlin, Melbourne, Milan, New York and Seoul, Prouvost interrupts the language of commerce with another proposition entirely. Instead of products, she offers migration. Instead of certainty, she offers transformation. Instead of division, she offers a dream of entanglement.

The work ultimately proposes that empathy itself may be a migratory act. To imagine another life, another body, another species or another journey is already to cross a border. In Prouvost’s universe, the future belongs not to those who defend boundaries but to those willing to move beyond them. The question she leaves hanging over the city is deceptively simple: could we belong to one world together?

Laure Prouvost is one of the most distinctive artistic voices of her generation, celebrated for immersive works that blend film, sculpture, installation, language and storytelling into richly sensory experiences. Moving fluidly between humour and melancholy, intimacy and absurdity, her work invites audiences into imagined worlds where meaning is constantly shifting and new forms of connection become possible.

Born in France and based in Brussels, Prouvost studied at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths in London before emerging as an internationally recognised artist whose practice challenges conventional distinctions between reality and fiction. Through films, installations and environments populated by objects, voices and fragmented narratives, she creates works that encourage audiences to navigate uncertainty through feeling rather than logic. Her art often explores themes of migration, memory, language, belonging and our relationship to the natural world, proposing alternative ways of understanding how we live together.

In 2022, Prouvost collaborated with CIRCA on No More Front Tears, a major public commission that transformed screens across London, Berlin, Melbourne, Milan, New York and Seoul into a poetic call for empathy and coexistence. Centred on the migration of both human and other-than-human beings, the work imagined a future in which borders dissolve and new forms of collective belonging emerge. Accompanied by Prouvost’s first augmented reality intervention in Piccadilly Circus, featuring a giant octopus resting beside the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain after a long migratory journey, the project invited audiences to consider what it might mean to belong not to a nation, but to a shared world. In partnership with Choose Love, the commission also helped raise support for refugees and displaced communities, extending its message of solidarity beyond the screen.

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2013 and the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2011, Prouvost represented France at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Her work has been exhibited internationally at leading institutions including Tate Britain, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Walker Art Center and Kunstmuseum Luzern. Through a practice that continually dissolves boundaries between people, places, species and stories, Laure Prouvost invites us to imagine more generous, interconnected and hopeful ways of being together.