Sculpture park by day / habitable sculpture by night
The premiere of tinyBE • living in a sculpture in 2021 includes 9 living sculptures by internationally renowned artists. The specifications: Use of sustainable resources, maximum size of 30 square meters, topic-related concepts developed for tinyBE. The sculptures exhibited in Frankfurt, Wiesbaden and Darmstadt are open to the public during the day. Guided tours and temporary day and night experiences can be booked.
With her extensive installations, the artist Laure Prouvost transports viewers into other worlds. Her multimedia environments reveal fragments of a known reality, which are then recontextualized and fantastically distorted in the Prouvostian universe.
In Boob Hills Burrows, various motifs from the artist's cosmos come together: her works time and again make reference to the female body, Mother Earth, the circle of life, the traditional British "high tea," and her (fictitious) grandparents. In doing so, she pursues a continuous narrative linking reality and fiction. For example, Burrow Me (2015) and Wantee (2013)- Prouvost was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize for the latter in 2013-appear to set up the narrative of Boob Hills Burrows.
With Wantee, the artist allows viewers to share in the search for her grandfather, who, according to Prouvost, was a conceptual artist himself and a close friend of Kurt Schwitters. One day her grandfather vanishes without a trace, presumably in his last conceptual work: a tunnel that he wanted to dig from Great Britain to Africa. Meanwhile, her grandmother-with little respect for the work of her lost spouse-makes use of his artworks, improving upon them or using them in her household. Most of Prouvost's video takes place in her grandparent's home, which appears to be quite primitive and is cluttered with works of art and filth from her grandfather's tunnel.
In Boob Hills Burrows the artist also leads viewers into an earth space. Here the cycle of becoming and passing is again addressed, one that ends in Wantee with her grandfather's disappearance in the earth. Citing the biblical creation myth, according to which God formed Adam from clay, Prouvost brings the people back to their origin. She is both blatantly obvious and playful when she refers to the creative power of nature in the form of the female body: Two mounds of earth take the shape of enormous breasts. While one breast is conceived as a fountain and thus as a nourishing source of life, the other is accessible and habitable: Through a narrow passage one reaches a cave-like room lined with clay-an analogy for the cervix and uterine cavity. Inside a bed, a television set broadcasting, among other things, weather reports from the last sixty years, and a tea corner invite one to hide away from the outside world. When rays of sunlight fall from above through the opulent nipples made of Venetian Murano glass, Prouvost's hill is lit by a reddish light, just as infants in the womb receive it filtered through the mothers skin.
In Frankfurt, viewers are invited to move through Prouvost's surrealistic visionary worlds-which in this case strongly call to mind the film sets of Federico Fellini or Woody Allen-and to dive into the artist's "individual mythology" (Harald Szeemann).
Lydia Korndörfer
