The Pale Fox

Camille Henrot describes her latest work The Pale Fox, on show at the Chisenhale Gallery in London until 13 April, as a three-dimensional counterpart to the video Grosse Fatigue, a piece shown at the last Venice Biennale where the French artist won the prestigious Silver Lion.

For anyone who missed the Biennial and the awards, Grosse Fatigue is a short video lasting thirteen minutes made by Henrot during a residency at the world's largest museum, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It is interesting to note how the extension – or rather the capacity – of the place where Henrot's research began, visibly conditioned its development and outcome. In both Grosse Fatigue as well as the more recent The Pale Fox, Henrot in fact seems to replicate the American museum's ambition to hold "everything".

Grosse Fatigue depicts a computer screen in which photographs of objects from the Smithsonian Institution are rhythmically layered with pages from wikipedia, videos and images. Each image that appears on the screen is combined with the one in the background and then quickly covered (if only partially) by new windows, thus forming continuous virtual collages. What might seem a random juxtaposition and succession of visual documents however underpins a more ambitious project, that of explaining the uncertain origins of the universe.

Wheras in Grosse Fatigue this narrative end remains concealed, in the installation The Pale Fox it is easier to perceive a progressive order that refers to a notion of evolution. The Pale Fox covers all four walls of the Chisenhale gallery, the north, west, east and south wall respectively, each of which represents a different stage of the development of humanity. An aluminium shelf – that ripples and breaks, almost as if to suggest the uneven progress of history – supports and interacts with the objects that make up the installation. Everything starts with the "west wall" dedicated to the principle of being, where Henrot has placed a large ink drawing that represents the first gesture, that will give life to all the rest. It then proceeds to the north with a collection of objects and images that indicate disclosure to the world, what the artist defines "the reason for becoming".

Among these we find the Gabagunnu, a cardboard box filled with calabashes, a fruit that according to mythology encloses the entire universe and that ironically refers to the logo for the Dropbox software for collecting and exchanging data. This allusion to the virtual world anticipates the last stage of the journey given over to technical reproduction. Before reaching the iPad, wikipedia and eBay, however Henrot forces us to become aware of the limits of development through a collection of images that document the pollution of natural resources and their possible exhaustion.

The last two walls are to be read not so much as a progression but more in synchronisation, one as the hidden face of the other. The artist defines the final part, containing the technological devices, as a 'shameless' space where there is no sense of guilt. It is also paradoxically a space of boredom, where the need to make sense of the world and question its origins reemerges, returning full circle to the starting point of the show.
So, not far from the white and feather-light Apple packaging we find a large, dusty encyclopaedia. It is as if at the end of the exhibition, the information that we have forced to shed weight, suddenly returned to reclaim its space.