Turner Prize: Prouvost

The Turner Prize 2013 has been awarded to Laure Prouvost for the video installation Wantee, tribute to a fictional grandfather inspired by Kurt Schwitters.

The Turner Prize 2013 has been awarded to Laure Prouvost, it was announced at Ebrington in Derry~Londonderry, UK City of Culture 2013, in partnership with Tate.

The jury thought her work was outstanding for its complex and courageous combination of images and objects in a deeply atmospheric environment. Building on personal memory, it weaves together fact, fiction, art history and modern technology.

Using film in a completely contemporary way, she takes viewers to an inner world, while making reference to the streaming of images in a post-internet age. The jury found the installation unexpectedly moving, developing far beyond its original association with the Schwitters exhibition.

In the last few years, Laure Prouvost has become known for films and installations characterised by richly layered and fractured narrative, language, translation and surreal interruptions. Her seductive and disorienting stories wittily toy with the audience’s ability to become fully absorbed by a single story. Her unconventional approach to text, montage, cinematic tropes and imagery create a distinct visual language that is engaged in an on-going dialogue between artistic mediums and the history of art, film, literature, and the continual translations between them.

In 2013 Prouvost completed two ambitious installations, Wantee and Farfromwords.

Both works feature immersive and carefully staged environments populated by a combination of painting, sculpture and text, each anchored with a significant video work. The dense settings that the artist constructs encourage audiences to explore the space around them, they are coaxed deep into the works by voiceover narration, a signature of Prouvost’s oeuvre, which addresses the audience directly, as if the work is made explicitly for each person who ventures in.

At Grizedale Arts in Lawson Park, she created the video and the elements for the installation Wantee. As a set, she built a muddy cabin populated with works by her fictional grandfather, a conceptual artist and a great friend of Schwitters. This invented family member appeared previously in Prouvost’s performance More from my lost grandfather (2011) and in her film The Artist (2010). The title and suggestive pots in Wantee pay homage to Schwitters’ girlfriend, nicknamed Wantee because she frequently asked, “want tea?”. The video reveals contradictory elements in Schwitters’ practice: Merz, for which he is renowned, and the traditional landscapes and portraits that he produced throughout his life. A dizzying tour of her grandparents’ cabin illuminates the unglamorous fate of her grandfather’s work and evokes questions of generational divides and artistic legacy. Many of the artworks and furniture that feature in the video are represented in a tearoom-like installation, included in “Schwitters in Britain” at Tate Britain, which compels exploration.

Farfromwords is an installation that layers video, sculpture, language and image. The piece was made on a six-month residency in Italy, which is a component of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women’s commissioning process leading to exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia. This two-part work is inspired by the aesthetics and sensuous pleasures of Italy. Within a large cylindrical structure her film Swallow is surrounded by tranquil imagery of Mediterranean foliage, beautiful women, and soft washes of azure blue.

Laure Prouvost in front of Città raccolta (work in progress) at the British School at Rome, May 2012. Courtesy Collezione Maramotti; Whitechapel Gallery. Photo C. Giorgio Benni

Laure Prouvost, Swallow shooting during her residency at Cittadellarte – Pistoletto Foundation, Biella, July 2012. Courtesy Collezione Maramotti; Whitechapel Gallery. Photo C. Dario Lasagni

Laure Prouvost, Swallow shooting during her residency at Cittadellarte – Pistoletto Foundation, Biella, July 2012. Courtesy Collezione Maramotti; Whitechapel Gallery. Photo C. Dario Lasagni

Laure Prouvost, pictures and notes taken by the artist during her residency in Italy. Courtesy Collezione Maramotti; Whitechapel Gallery. © Laure Prouvost