Laure Prouvost

October 9 and 10, 2014
 
The artist Laure Prouvost, born in Lille, France in 1978 and working in London since 1999, is a passionate explorer of the unfulfilled and perhaps unattainable possibilities of art – its ways of communicating and its dormant utopias. Accordingly, her work covers a vast scope divided between performance, installation and video works. She has recently been honored with prestigious awards: the 2013 Turner Prize for Wantee, and the Grand Prize of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2011 for The Artist. 

 
The Film Museum presentation brings together a variety of works in the concentrated setting of cinema – with the goal of conveying an essential quality of her work: its excessive demands. Again and again, images and dialogue, sounds and colors, photographs and subtitles overlap, complement and contradict each other in these rapidly edited, colorful and deeply sensual works. With a wink, they encourage us explicitly to attach our own meanings – for example when, at the end of one of her films, the audience is asked questions about the characters, or, in several other works, becomes involved with the absurdly fictionalized family constellations of the artist herself.
 
The concrete experience (and creation) of uncertainty is at the center of Prouvost's oeuvre, in terms of our assumptions about art and the artist, the past and memories, images and identity. Her videos seem strangely modest while at the same time testing all conceivable limits: They demonstrate for us what the moving image is capable of – all the while battling against their own constraints.
 
The majority of the works in this show will be screened for the first time in Austria. Laure Prouvost will be present during the showings and will be available for discussion with the audience.

Vienna-based author Lucas Cejpek has kindly allowed us to publish a text (PDF) he wrote on Laure Prouvost (Lucas Cejpek: „Unterbrechung. Burn Gretchen“. Wien: Sonderzahl Verlag 2014 / copyright for the english translation by Geoffrey C. Howes).