Camille Henrot (b. 1978, Paris, France) lives and works in New York, USA. Henrot’s multidisciplinary practice moves seamlessly between film, drawing, sculpture and installation. Henrot references literature, mythology, cinema and anthropology to reconsider the typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge. As part of a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, USA, Henrot created the film Grosse Fatigue, for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Italy (2013). In 2014, Henrot was awarded the Nam June Paik Award. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia (2020); Palais de Tokyo, France (2017); Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (2017); and 9th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2016).
Camille Henrot
Camille Henrot presented a set of newly commissioned sculptures and paintings from her Wet Job (2020-21) series at The Lewis’s Building. In these works, Henrot makes use of the familiar art-historical trope of the mother and child in order to foreground obscured aspects of motherhood and their reflections in society at large. The overriding theme of alienation is crystallized in the figure of the woman expressing milk with a breast pump. By operating on the body as a field of action rather than of identity, the breast pump construes the machine as a model for thinking about the body. It amplifies the shame of animal excess (leaking breasts), of performing alone what should be done with another (like with masturbation), and of requiring the supplementary aid of a machine in the first place. Henrot resists the reduction of motherhood’s embedded subjectivity to biology, as is often done to deprive women’s voices, and provides an intriguing view of alienation in the name of liquidity and consumption.
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, supported by kamel mennour, Paris/London; Metro Pictures, New York; and König Galerie, Berlin/London/Tokyo. With additional support from Fluxus Art Projects.
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