Laure Prouvost: Oma-je
Prouvost is known for her playful use of language, translation and transliteration, experimental narrated video, and immersive, surprising installations that transport visitors into unfamiliar worlds created largely from everyday objects. The exhibition will feature iconic pieces by Prouvost such as Wantee (2013), Grandma鈥檚 Dream (2013), This Means (2019), Four For See Beauties (2022), and Every Sunday, Grand Ma (2022).
Oma-je also includes an enveloping new work titled Here Her Heart Hovers (2023), which has been co-commissioned by Remai Modern, Kunsthalle Wien, and Wiener Festwochen. This installation focuses on the figure of the grandmother as both ancestor and trailblazer, transforming the gallery into a theatre of objects relating to memory, imagination, and inheritance. Visitors are invited to travel through time and lose themselves in the dark, complex play between past and present, individual and society, and between modern and ancient concepts, relationships, materials, and techniques.
There are three recent films embedded in Here Her Heart Hovers. In You, My, Omma, Mama (2023), nine women call out into the French coastal landscape for their grandmothers. Together, the circle of friends ventures into a cave where they reflect on potent memories of their oma, nonna, granny, bobo, babushka, halmeoni, and yaya, with personal and evocative objects in hand. A child performs a shadow play for Great Grandma, the magic oma in Shadow Does (2023). The story told offers exciting, heartwarming, and alarming details about the contemporary world. A Walking Story (2023) brings the nine women from You, My, Omma, Mama, back together around a campfire where their pithy reflections, like incantations, evoke memories of extraordinary foremothers who were drivers of social progress, equality, artistic innovation, and scientific discovery. They call upon us to keep our hearts and minds open so that we can continue to give and receive from a flow of shared knowledge and experience.
The film screens float around the room as part of an ethereal installation of hanging mobiles that appear as birds and spirits above the ground and create enchanting shadow play. In the center, a fire is burning. A voiceover tells stories of grandmothers, and beautifully crafted glass and found objects are gathered like characters around the fire. One foremother who served as an inspiration for this project is the iconic 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf. She is a powerful figure, amongst the earliest examples of figurative art that has been endlessly reinterpreted through time, and an important foremother to art as we know it. Each object gathered in Here Her Heart Hovers is a symbol or a memory of a beloved nana, artist, or revolutionary foremother. The entire environment is brought together by a newly commissioned composition by pioneering electronic musician and composer Elisabeth Schimana. The grandmothering celebrated in this exhibition is a verb, a practice of care, of mentorship, and of knowledge transfer rather than heredity or biology.
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Prouvost is known for her playful use of language, translation and transliteration, experimental narrated video, and immersive, surprising installations that transport visitors into unfamiliar worlds created largely from everyday objects. The exhibition will feature iconic pieces by Prouvost such as Wantee (2013), Grandma鈥檚 Dream (2013), This Means (2019), Four For See Beauties (2022), and Every Sunday, Grand Ma (2022).
Oma-je also includes an enveloping new work titled Here Her Heart Hovers (2023), which has been co-commissioned by Remai Modern, Kunsthalle Wien, and Wiener Festwochen. This installation focuses on the figure of the grandmother as both ancestor and trailblazer, transforming the gallery into a theatre of objects relating to memory, imagination, and inheritance. Visitors are invited to travel through time and lose themselves in the dark, complex play between past and present, individual and society, and between modern and ancient concepts, relationships, materials, and techniques.
There are three recent films embedded in Here Her Heart Hovers. In You, My, Omma, Mama (2023), nine women call out into the French coastal landscape for their grandmothers. Together, the circle of friends ventures into a cave where they reflect on potent memories of their oma, nonna, granny, bobo, babushka, halmeoni, and yaya, with personal and evocative objects in hand. A child performs a shadow play for Great Grandma, the magic oma in Shadow Does (2023). The story told offers exciting, heartwarming, and alarming details about the contemporary world. A Walking Story (2023) brings the nine women from You, My, Omma, Mama, back together around a campfire where their pithy reflections, like incantations, evoke memories of extraordinary foremothers who were drivers of social progress, equality, artistic innovation, and scientific discovery. They call upon us to keep our hearts and minds open so that we can continue to give and receive from a flow of shared knowledge and experience.
The film screens float around the room as part of an ethereal installation of hanging mobiles that appear as birds and spirits above the ground and create enchanting shadow play. In the center, a fire is burning. A voiceover tells stories of grandmothers, and beautifully crafted glass and found objects are gathered like characters around the fire. One foremother who served as an inspiration for this project is the iconic 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf. She is a powerful figure, amongst the earliest examples of figurative art that has been endlessly reinterpreted through time, and an important foremother to art as we know it. Each object gathered in Here Her Heart Hovers is a symbol or a memory of a beloved nana, artist, or revolutionary foremother. The entire environment is brought together by a newly commissioned composition by pioneering electronic musician and composer Elisabeth Schimana. The grandmothering celebrated in this exhibition is a verb, a practice of care, of mentorship, and of knowledge transfer rather than heredity or biology.
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The PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art will present Oma-je, the largest North American exhibition to date by acclaimed French artist Laure Prouvost, opening to the public on November 1, 2024.
The PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Oma-je, the largest North American exhibition to date by acclaimed French artist Laure Prouvost, opening to the public on November 1, 2024.
The PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art will present Oma-je, the largest North American exhibition to date by acclaimed French artist Laure Prouvost, opening to the public on November 1, 2024.
Laure Prouvost, creator of work that is gloriously messy and unrepentantly weird, is an art star.