Camille Henrot

Camille Henrot’s work, which embraces many artistic disciplines and theories of knowledge, utilises a very broad range of media: film, video, illustration, photography, sculpture, installation.

The Gucci Museo exhibition in Florence will be showing Grosse Fatigue, a work first exhibited in 2013, at the 55th Venice Biennale, where she won the Silver Lion, and gained herself a very large following amongst international critics.

Based on extensive research carried out at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Grosse Fatigue is a 13-minute film, featuring original music from composer Joakim and the voice of slam poet Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, who reads a long spoken word poem written in conjunction with the writer Jacob Bromberg. Grosse Fatigue is shot through with immense utopian ambition: an ambition to create an infinite intermingling of scientific history with tales from history, mythology, art, anthropology… linked to Genesis and the evolution of the world.

“In my video – the artist explains – the desire to universalise knowledge is accompanied by the consciousness that I have of this act. Which is to say that at the very moment that I attempt to make the world liveable by universalising the subjective, I understand the futility of this attempt and its inherent limits”. In conjunction with Grosse Fatigue, Gucci Museo is also showing two of Camille Henrot's sculptural pieces, which make use of varied materials, such as the industrial items used in Tevau (2009), or flowers, like in the series entitled Est-il possible d’être révolutionnaire et d’aimer les fleurs? (“Is it possible to be a revolutionary and love flowers?”), first shown at the 2012 Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

from October 2, 2014 until February 8, 2015
Camille Henrot
Museo Gucci
Piazza della Signoria
Firenze