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Laure Prouvost

For forgetting

Curator: Margot Norton
Madeleine Stack
Eyeline 82
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‘Deeper! I want it to go deeper, deeper!’ Desperate as a child, Laure Prouvost’s hands press the screen frantically. ‘I want it to be deep! Deeper! This room needs to be deeper, much deeper!’ 

Laure Prouvost’s video works display a constant naïve desire for something better, a yearning for something more beautiful, something, something … what? Even she does not seem to quite know. In her recent solo exhibition at the New Museum, her first in the United States, the 2013 Turner Prize winner combined a number of video works with a playful installation populated by mannequins, pot plants, fake handbags and Nigerian scam emails.

In the Museum’s lobby, Prouvost divided the long space into a series of rooms, the layout playing on scale, with each room at angles with the others and changing in size and light. This labyrinthine structure makes her disorienting videos all the more so, as the audience feels in turns amused and vulnerable, as the voiceover shifts from manic to dreamy and back again.

Dividing the long space is a black video room screening the film How To Make Money Religiously, which, as the title suggests, offers a get-rich scheme interlaced with spiritual fervour. Contemporary ideals of money and possession, the desire to be greater and have more, are cast in a bizarrely sweet world of personal histories and shared fears.

Prouvost draws upon the humour inherent in the forced intimacies of digital marketing, forever tailored to make the recipient believe it is them, and only them, who is being addressed. There is a point where the wariness with which we approach the internet, infomercials and constantly being sold something, dissolves into pleasure at

Laure Prouvost, How To Make Money Religiously, 2014. Stills. HD video, 8:44min. Courtesy of the artist and MOT International, London and Brussels. From the exhibition For forgetting, 2014. New Museum, New York. 

Laure Prouvost, How To Make Money Religiously, 2014. Stills. HD video, 8:44min. Courtesy of the artist and MOT International, London and Brussels. From the exhibition For forgetting, 2014. New Museum, New York. 

Laure Prouvost, How To Make Money Religiously, 2014. Stills. HD video, 8:44min. Courtesy of the artist and MOT International, London and Brussels. From the exhibition For forgetting, 2014. New Museum, New York.

Laure Prouvost, How To Make Money Religiously, 2014. Stills. HD video, 8:44min. Courtesy of the artist and MOT International, London and Brussels. From the exhibition For forgetting, 2014. New Museum, New York.