Laure Prouvost is a storyteller. She has developed her practice originally coming from structural film toward a unique and sensual form of expanded cinema, constantly testing the potentiality of imagination on the perception of reality and questioning inherited and dominant conventions of perception. Her work combines drawing, sculpture, and moving image, recurrently reinventing the conventions of the used medium.
She uses media technologies in an inventive way, attributing human traits to them, such as emotional or sensual sensations, and incorporates organic materials, such as plants, as well as highly industrial, creating immersive multimedia installations that stimulate the visitor’s perception and imagination through a multisensory experience. The artist explores the delicate relationships between human perception and the vast, often unseen forces that shape our existence – other-than-human forces that extend from the subatomic level of quantum mechanics to the expansive, ever-changing dynamics of cosmic and planetary movements.
For the Bienal, Prouvost has assembled a new site-specific, delicate chandelier-like, kinetic multimedia installation at the center of the Pavilion that connects the architectural and conceptual levels of the exhibition. The installation is inspired by Evaristo’s poem and its suggestion to allow oneself to explore other paths, and ways of seeing, perceiving, thinking, moving and ultimately being, and be guided by all the senses. Its central component is a climbing plant that has been encouraged to grow freely and find its own paths for the duration of the exhibition, and whose growing sounds are amplified in the space. As it is typical for Prouvost, this living core is added by further organic material, such as found dried plants and seeds – that might fall on the visitors when passing through the Bienal to be carried and spread out into the world. The natural seeds will be joined with inorganic materials, including her iconic glass boobs, to seduce and stimulate the visitor’s imagination.
Following ideas around “trespassing,” the installation explores notions of control, sensuality, and the vast field of the possible.
