Laure Prouvost

‘Legsicon’ delves into the philosophical depths of the artist’s practice, through the familiar, if transformed, format of a lexicon, to portray the work of an artist developing complex thought through artistic languages. Deviating from a typical monograph, Legsicon functions as a sort of dictionary, exploring and expanding on thirty-six notions in Prouvost’s work, with each incorporating a commissioned text, new drawings created by the artist, and selected documentation of her related works. Playful, serious, absurd, seductive, and bodily, ‘Legsicon’ is published to accompany her exhibition at M HKA, Antwerp.… (más)

Born in France, Laure Prouvost received the Max Mara Prize for Women, 2012, and will be exhibiting new work at Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Britain in Spring, 2013. Provoust s first artist book extends her preoccupations with the occurrence of mis translations, in which objects, stories, or scene are transformed through film, video and in this case, onto the printed page. Exploring ideas of translation, mirroring and narrative, each mistranslation allows a new narrative to develop that often is unrelated to its origin. Using a technique she describes as back word stories, Prouvost uses the idea of the artists book as a biography, juxtaposing formal devices with mini narratives, images and handwritten notes. The book is made up of text and images, including a newly commissioned biography that is punctuated by graphic statements about language, translation, and cultural misunderstandings, in which the subject, or narrator, merges with the book itself.

Laure Prouvost explores the processes of narrative, translation and reflection, and the substantial mis-communications, cultural slippages, inventive opportunities and transformations inherent to these processes. Each mis-translation allows a new episode or incident to form that can disorder and reassemble its origin. In this project she uses the material format and expectations of the artist book as a means to make new work. In translating video, painting and sound onto the printed pages Prouvost instills the object with emotion and a sensorial self-awareness, and invites the reader to share ‘the artist’s’ psychological experience. Annotations and drawings that make reference to the protocols of the book, ‘This page does not need you to exist, this page is so heavy to turn, this text like the sound of your voice when reading these words’ provoke a physical and affective relationship with the texts and images presented.… (más)