Laure Prouvost - the wet wet wanderer

About

the wet wet wanderer is a new work by Laure Prouvost, drawing from a particular passage in her feature-length magnum opus The Wanderer. The latter film translates fellow artist Rory Macbeth’s mistranslation of Kafka from the original German text with no knowledge of German or a dictionary. In the ‘wet sequence’ section we follow the progress of Gregor, a tortured writer daubing paper with squid ink; a novel in the making, a mind unraveling, time stalled, distended and looping.

Prouvost’s installation transforms the ground floor of Witte de With into a strange mutated sub-aqueous bar, laced with squid ink and dotted with vodka fountains. Combining sculpture, video and sound, the form of a mundane high street commercial space is defamiliarized and shot through with a narrative overlay that metamorphoses literature to space, film to sculpture. Here language is as slippery as a squid, function as deceitful as fiction.

Para | Fictions

the wet wet wanderer is presented as part of Para | Fictions, a cycle of sustained investigations taking as its focus the relationship between literature and visual art through the practice of ten artists; Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicque, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Mark Geffriaud, Laure Prouvost, Oscar Santillan, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Lucy Skaer and Rayyane Tabet.

Each project on display presents a different artistic methodology, constituting a combination of each artist's visual interests and literary underpinnings, to seek the viability of repositioning ‘reference’ as ‘form’, ‘translation’ as ‘co-authorship’.