Laure Prouvost: In the Depth Heat Leaks at La Casa Encendida

October 7, 2022–January 8, 2023

Laure Prouvost (France, 1978) is known for her immersive multisensory installations that cross media and have interwoven plots that merge fiction and reality. She recounts astonishing stories in her work, searching for a new audiovisual language based on a tactile and sensual approach.

Prouvost, a recipient of the 2013 Turner Prize and a representative of France at the 2019 Venice Biennale, makes artworks in which the pliability of language and narrative take center stage. By departing from conventional linear tales, she frequently plays with purposefully bad translations and breaks the expected and routine links between language, picture, and perception, leaving room for humor and imaginative flourishes that attract audiences.

As she explains, “Words for me are visually powerful, because with words people create their own vision. I am just hinting and suggesting possibilities, the audience is making its own image in its head. It is also about misunderstanding, misinterpreting, miscommunicating—words also suggesting failure and other senses.”

Prouvost plays around with the display area in a similar manner. She challenges preconceived notions about how information is conveyed through storytelling by constantly generating friction between what occurs on and off screen, between the feeling of what is portrayed and what is being experienced in the room. This underlying playfulness expands the possible readings of each work while eluding standard association processes. Prouvost restores and exposes the magical qualities of the ordinary in a manner akin to children’s games based on the free association of thoughts and images.

In the Depth Heat Leaks, a solo exhibition by Prouvost organized by Joo Laia, is now on view at La Casa Encendida (Madrid). It spans a 12-year period during which Prouvost created five audiovisual pieces. All of the works are connected by a painstaking immersive intervention in four of La Casa Encendida’s exhibition spaces, and they include a wide variety of connected elements, including found objects, painting, sound, sculpture, and found objects. These elements are blended into multiple strata with a clear performative slant.