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about Laure Prouvost

Laure Prouvost’s work often engages with language through installation and film, creating an unexpected and often humorous detachment between image, language, and the perceived meaning. Her juxtaposition of images and texts prompt an exploration of the imagination and the surreal that immerses the viewer in a playful questioning of experience and meaning.

Laure Prouvost’s artistic output consistently returns to themes of escape into unfamiliar worlds or imaginings of unexpected alternative environments. A strong narrative impulse propels her practice, resulting in immersive, transmedial installations with interwoven storylines that combine fiction and reality. Her videos, installations, paintings and tapestries unhinge commonplace and expected connections between language, image, and perception.

Stepping away from traditional linear narratives, the artist crafts sensual environments laden with playful mistranslation that open a space for the viewer to grapple with the unstable relationship between imagination and reality. The elasticity of the written word comprises a central element of Prouvost’s practice, stating: “Words for me are very 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.”

(courtesy of Carlier Gebauer)

about Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven

Since the early eighties, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has produced an extensive oeuvre of drawings and other works on paper, as well as short videos. A straightforward feminist tone pervades in all her works, in which the erotic meets machine-fetishism. Interior, if not domestic spaces often serve as settings for her drawings and collages, from which dream-like futuristic enactments between human and machine-like forms unfold. In the nineties, handmade paper works gave way to computer graphics, while text has always featured alongside images, underlining the message of Van Kerckhoven’s proud, sometimes exhibitionist female figures like song-lyrics.

Music plays an important role in Van Kerckhkoven’s creative production in parallel to her visual output, and she and her husband Danny Devos have stood as a key pair of the Antwerp experimental music scene under the band name Club Moral (1981–now).

To contemplate the entire work of AMVK is to enter an idiosyncratic world, littered with fragments and sketchy representations from the arts, is to be confronted with abstractions, clusters of ideas and quotations ranging from occult philosophies to advanced sciences and technological concepts.

An extremely ambitious project is taking shape, one that is not satisfied with a sensitive, aesthetic representation of the world, but has set itself the task of confronting the limits of the logical and the transparent of the rational with the obscure, its unthinkable, normative opposite. A dialectic project, therefore, that cannot easily be described or organised. As dense and multiform as her techniques and performances are and as challenging as the ideas and concepts she incorporates into them, an acquaintance with her work is more like a journey through an oeuvre, which in itself is an adventurous trip through the fields of interest and focal points that have marked the counterculture over the past forty years.

(courtesy of Barbara Thumm)

about Tarek Lakhrissi

Tarek Lakhrissi is a French poet and artist who has a particular interest in conversations about race, class and gender. His captivating poems and installations, borrow their aesthetics from a dazzling and vibrant pop culture, aiming to transform traditional narratives. Lakhrissi often uses autofiction – the interfusion of a biographical report with fictional elements – as a tool. Therefore he simultaneously offers his audiences opportunities for identification and tells an imagined story through a myriad of layers.

(courtesy of Migros, Zurich)

Lakhrissi has been exhibited internationally in galleries and institutions including Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney as part of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney; Wiels, Brussels; Palazzo Re Rebaudengo/Sandretto, Guarene/Torino; Manchester International Festival; Mostyn, Llandudno; Tinguely Museum, Basel; HKW, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Fondation Ricard, Paris; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma as part of the Quadriennale di Roma; High Art, Paris; Vitrine, London; La Verrière, Fondation d’enterprise Hermès, Brussles; Kevin Space, Vienna; Hayward Gallery, London; Auto Italia South East, London; Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; L’Espace Arlaud, Lausanne; Zabriskie, Geneva; Fondation Gulbenkian, Paris; Veda gallery, Florence; CRAC Alsace; Kim?, Riga; Artexte, Montreal; La Gaité Lyrique, Paris; and SMC/CAC, Vilnius.

Lakhrissi’s artworks are held in private and public collections such as Defares Collection, Netherlands; Fondazione Sandretto Collection, Italy;  Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, France; CNAP, France; FRAC Aquitaine MÉCA, France; FRAC Grand Large, France; IAC Villeurbanne, France; FMAC, France; Fiorucci Art Trust, UK and Italy; Mauro Mattei Art Trust, UK and Italy and the Johns Hopkins University Collection.

Tarek Lakhrissi is represented by the following gallery;
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Galerie Allen, Paris

You can discover more of Tarek Lakhrissi on his own website.