LANGUAGE LESSONS

An installation of two moving image works by Laure Prouvost.

Language – in its broadest sense – permeates the work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that combine film and installation in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation.

What I like about words is that they are so questionable. I struggled as a child with very bad French and English. Each word can have so many meanings depending on where it is. Many times in my films I use the same image in different places and that change of context completely changes what it says. It’s the same with words. They are used constantly, but it’s nice if we can question them a bit.

Laure Prouvost in conversation with Jarrett Earnest, Brooklyn Rail

Prouvost’s selection of works for this presentation – DIT LEARN (2017) and Re-dit-en-un-in-learning (2020) – was influenced by the CAST building’s past life as a school. Both works instruct the viewer to unlearn and relearn language, with emotive words and concepts replaced by anthropomorphised objects, which are then transcribed and translated into progressively more complex lexical and linguistic tests and eventually entire narratives.

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France in 1978 and is currently based in Brussels. She won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013.