Laure Prouvost

Drilling Brain / Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Art Work) / Look Beneath the Curtain / Deeper / Further

2015; 2019; 2011; 2010; 2010,
Five-part video installation

Laure Prouvost’s video installation entangles the viewer in a whirlpool of contradictions. The videos, visual finger exercises created between 2010 and 2019, intentionally elude the audience’s gaze. The monitors, which are directed at the floor or the wall – one partially covered with a cloth – allow only sparse glimpses, sometimes only an optical flicker of the screen’s reflections. Underlined by expressive gestures, largely hidden from the viewer’s direct gaze, the videos, some shown on monitors set on metal pedestals, manifest the artist’s aspiration to, for instance, place the screen under the floor. As a result, they simultaneously form a call to action when it comes to how the work is installed. A «Love Letter to Fellow Art Work» takes Prouvost’s strategy to the extreme: the monitor, turned away from the audience, addresses the artistic work in question directly. As in other of her complex, humorous installations, Prouvost develops an interwoven conglomeration of paradoxes in terms of language, video, and space. Starting from the impossibility of talking about art in times of war, she builds a multi-layered construct that forces recipients to find their own perspective. (Susanne Jäger)