Camille Henrot was born in Paris in 1978. Conflating the roles of artist and anthropologist, Henrot’s art is born out of an intensive research process, the findings of which she uses to construct rich multimedia narratives that explore the history of the universe, the nature of myth, and the limits of human knowledge. Henrot’s practice draws together a range of natural and cultural materials through the combination of video, sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, and ikebana flower arrangements, and the resulting constellations of objects and images demonstrate how systems of classification and representation shape the ways one understands the world.
Grosse Fatigue (2013), a thirteen-minute video largely shot in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., vividly captures the overarching concerns of Henrot’s oeuvre. Merging images from contemporary culture and anthropological artifacts set to a soundtrack of hip-hop and spoken word, Grosse Fatigue is a dense visual system formed from the fleeting juxtapositions of images framed within web browser windows. Henrot’s incongruous pairings—contemporary painting with tribal body ornamentation, amphibious reptiles with digital technology, to name but two—ask the viewer to search for the unifying thread that runs between them. From one perspective, Henrot’s work expresses the unprecedented simultaneity and multiplicity of imagery within contemporary digital culture, which produces both the possibility for discovering new relationships between things and the risk of each object losing all meaning as a result of sensory overload. Henrot’s work also possesses a more profound, cosmological dimension as it strives to encourage the viewer to discover the universal archetypes that transcend the artificial boundaries between nature, history, and culture.
Henrot has had solo exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, France (2008); New Orleans Museum of Art (2013–14); Baltimore Museum of Art (2014); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2014); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2014); Westfälicher Kunstverein Münster, Munster, Germany (2015); and Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal (2015–16). Her work has also been presented in a number of group exhibitions, including L’artiste en ethnographe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2012); A Disagreeable Object, SculptureCenter, New York (2012); Benin Biennial, Abomey: Inventer le monde, L’artiste citoyen (2012–13); Venice Biennale: Il Palazzo Enciclopedico/The Encyclopedic Palace (2013); Companionable Silences, as part of Nouvelle Vague, Palais de Tokyo (2013); Before Our Eyes–Other Cartographies of the RIF, Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona (2014); Rare Earth, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary–Augarten, Vienna (2015); and The Primitive in Us, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015). Henrot has received many honors, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2012); the Silver Lion, Venice Biennial (2013); and the Nam June Paik Award (2014). She was also a finalist for the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize. Henrot lives and works in Paris and New York.
© Guggenheim Foundation.
