Fires, Forests, and a Flying Grandma: Max Delany on 5 Works by Laure Prouvost
Melbourne curator Max Delany shares the familial histories and sensory experiences contained within Laure Prouvost's solo show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Max Delany. Courtesy Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photo: © Casey Horsfield.
Laure Prouvost: Oui Move In You charts a course through the past decade of the French artist's practice, taking the viewer on a journey that departs from the realms of the underground and subconscious.
Co-curated by ACCA artistic director Max Delany with associate curator Annika Kristensen, Oui Move In You features eight video and installation works, from Prouvost's 2013 Turner Prize-winning experimental film Wantee to a newly commissioned suspended 'forest', La forêt (2024).
Invited by Ocula Magazine, Delany introduces the exhibition through five select works, sharing Prouvost's journey through bodily and earthly realms towards celestial plains and imaginative homage.
1. Wantee (2013)
The exhibition commences with a work devoted to Laure's grandfather, a conceptual artist and friend of Kurt Schwitters who disappeared while in the process of digging a tunnel from his home in England's Lake District to Africa. The work also introduces Laure's artist grandmother, who has taken on the responsibility for the artistic legacy of her husband, audaciously updating and improving his life's work.
Wantee brings together hallmarks of Laure's experimental filmmaking: the radical use of montage and jump cut, the indelible layering of textured sounds and atmospherics, and the use of voiceover—at times intimate and whispering, drawing us into the artist's confidence, and at other times visceral, corporeal, and intensely psychologically. Her aberrant, observational first-person perspective meanders freely between cinéma verité and diaristic autofiction.
In a conspiratorial sleight of hand, Wantee ingeniously enacts the disappearance of 'Grand-dad' to make way for 'Grandma'—who also features prominently and dramatically at the conclusion of the exhibition—signalling a shift from reason to intuition and from history to herstory, interring the patriarchal canon of art history.
2. Gathering Ho Ma, The glaneuse (2023)
At the centre of the exhibition is a campfire, Gathering Ho Ma, The glaneuse. We collected the firewood from the beach after a swim, along with aromatic plants and oils. The installation is illuminated by flickering stage lights which animate a series of blown-glass objects that variously refer to the artistic and intellectual 'grandmothers' who have shaped Laure personally and artistically.
Five ceramic log stools invite the viewer to commune, to join in a seance of sparkling words, memories, and reflections which emanate from the fire as the artist tells stories of radical, pathfinding figures who came before her such as Carolee Schneemann, Louise Bourgeois, and Agnès Varda, whose film The Gleaners and I (2000) is referenced in the title.
Alongside filmic montage, the idea of gleaning and bricolage is central to Laure's practice. She collects and reassembles objects, ideas, and histories and brings people together to explore how ideas, forms, and subjectivities are passed from one generation to the next. Beside the fire is a teapot made by Laure's own grandma, and we are invited to have a cup.
3. Four for see beauties (2022)
The thing I remember most vividly when I first encountered Laure's work was its sensory intensity, its fecundity and leaps of imagination. There's the deep dive into desire and the unconscious; the fluidity and play with language; the holes and slippages which transport the viewer across diverse ecological and psycho-social terrains; and the dizzying oscillation between the poetic and the real.
Alongside the roles and legacies of grandmother and grandfather, Oui Move In You explores the maternal spaces of mother and child, and contemporary social spaces in which humans commune with the natural world. Four for see beauties is exemplary in this regard. We push our way through a dense tunnel of red velvet curtains to enter a womb-like space; projected on a five-metre-wide curved screen is an intimate congregation of three women and a newborn baby alongside imagery of fish, octopi, and other aquatic life.
In this aqueous, pre-linguistic space, sounds and images become multi-sensory, sweaty, and melt into one another like the experience and memory of life itself. We are reminded of the wonders and origins of life in this haptic, blissful space and how it might feel to be a newborn again—as Laure describes, 'thinking with our arms', 'feeling with our eyes', and making sense of the world through our senses.
4. Every Sunday, Grand Ma (2022)
As we exit the womb of Four for sea beauties we enter a forest, La forêt (2024)—a dense installation of suspended mobiles made from plant matter and technological waste. In the distance we see the horizon and sky. Clouds hug mountaintops upon which glass birds are perched, making nests from technological detritus. This ethereal, celestial landscape is the setting for Every Sunday, Grand Ma, in which Laure's grandma jumps dramatically from a plane. She is naked and flies through the sky with joyous, gayful abandon—as Laure narrates, 'Feeling the clouds ... off she flies, in a dance with the world'.
Here we experience the ascendancy of Grand Ma as she grows large, palm-frond wings and levitates in space, somersaulting acrobatically in the clouds. She is the image of ultimate liberation, freed from the weight of her earthly responsibilities. A chorus of children celebrates her flight across frontiers in a eulogy to collective freedom as much as to the possibility of migration—'together we migrate'—unbound by geographic, cultural, or political borders.
Cloud-like smoke permeates the gallery, extending the poetic space of representation into the real space of the viewer. We float in the clouds with her, bearing witness to Grand Ma's final act of skyward levitation. In this sense the work serves as an ultimate crescendo to the exhibition, completing a narrative arc from the protagonist of the grandfather in Wantee to the grandmother in Every Sunday—from underground to celestial plane, from his story to her story. As with all of Laure's work, it is composed with joy and love, for acts of the imagination, for one another, and for those who pave the way.
5. H Oma Je (2024)
It's been such a pleasure to work with Laure on this exhibition and we are delighted to have produced a limited-edition artist's book as an extension to the project. It is titled H Oma Je, which is a characteristic play on words related to the idea of homage, grandmothers, and the 'I' or eye of the artist.
It includes contributions by over 100 friends, artists, colleagues, and collaborators who were invited to write short reflections, with accompanying pictures, in honour of grandmothers, artistic matriarchs, inspirational elders, ancestors, and forebears. Together, these words and images sparkle and float through space and time, inviting the reader to cast their own memories and reflections into the chorus of dancing flames and smoking embers.
The book concludes with an epic poem by Laure—the transcript of A Walking Story (2023), a recent video which forms part of the trilogy OMA JE (2023)—which speaks of a 'long, long, very long journey' from a grandma of 30,000 years ago, the Venus of Willendorf, to the present moment. Laure introduces us to a cast of travel companions:
Felicita [De La Rosa] made us believe in magique, with her 'love' sounded like 'laugh' / Yoko [Ono] filmed bottoms as peaches / All power to the people was Angela [Davis'] dream / Marie [Curie] was working on radioactivity / People will never forget how you made them feel, Maya [Angelou] said / Katharine [Graham] got scandals out, to reach all [...]
These are just a handful of the narratives of fellow travellers that Laure has gathered, and the journey continues... —[O]
