Laure Prouvost

Things move quickly in the ludic world of Laure Prouvost, so listen close and try to keep up. Unexpected liaisons arise between words in her loquacious videos, which spill into accompanying installations and artifacts. For instance, sitting amid the quirky tea service surrounding the Turner Prize–winning Wantee, 2013, one occasionally hears an anguished lament from an adjacent room, accessed by a diminutive corridor worthy of Alice in Wonderland: “They don’t understand! They don’t fucking understand!” the artist protests in a video titled Stong Sory Vegetables, 2010. But misunderstandings become generative opportunities for imagination in Prouvost’s work.

This is especially true when the artist moves between her native French and adopted English, as in The Smoking Image, 2015. Shot in part on the grounds of this museum’s historic chateau, the video swirls around a gang of local teens preoccupied by dreams of escape and sexual awakening. Anglophones beware: The subtitles make for misleading crutches supporting the teens’ rapid-fire slang. Literal translations from the French break down into phonetic transcriptions that rely on proximate English faux amis, resulting in such phrases as “On ear alone evite the era of LA and use that font.” Staccato editing splices cigarettes and motorcycles with lactating breasts and tongues licking electronic touchscreens. As mother’s milk dissolves into motor exhaust, the video marks a jump-cut leap from childhood to adulthood.

Images have tactility in Prouvost’s videos. Likewise, the sensuousness of words can appear more important than their significations. It’s a quality that places Prouvost in a genealogy that includes dada poets and Lewis Carroll, but the instability of linguistic convention in her work also testifies to the estranged experience of leaving home. She’s a fabulist at heart, using the child’s expansive capacity to invent stories in order to confront the most confounding of situations.