Laure Prouvost: For Forgetting

"Laure Prouvost: For Forgetting" is on view from February 12 to April 13, 2014.

In her films and installations, Prouvost unhinges commonplace and expected connections between language, image, and perception. Stepping away from traditional linear narratives, she exposes the unstable relationship between imagination and reality, and opens up a space where audiences can engage provocatively with surreal aspects of meaning. In her films, she often addresses viewers directly, manipulating their senses through a barrage of fast-paced moving images, directive texts, and interspersed clips of sound to achieve a physical experience. In recent works such as The Artist (2010), Farfromwords (2013), andWantee (2013), which won her the 2013 Turner Prize, Prouvost expands the scope of her disorienting and whimsical modes of display, creating all-encompassing environments that interweave elements of sculpture, painting, and drawing amongst her films.

For her New Museum presentation, Prouvost presents “For Forgetting” (2014), a new work that will include a semicircular collaged mural, a multichannel video installation, scattered sculptural elements, and a film, How to Make Money Religiously (2014). Centering on the problems as well as the possibilities of memory and forgetting, the piece addresses the arbitrary distinctions that can be ascribed to power and possession. “For Forgetting” expands Prouvost’s multilayered investigation of the slippages between systems of communication, and conjures diverse interpretations dependant on how one perceives or remembers the story.

Images: Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley