Camille Henrot
Saturday
3D video, color, sound, 19 min 32 sec
Courtesy of the artist & Kamel Mennour (Paris/London); Galerie König (Berlin); Metro Pictures (New York)
FAENA FORUM
Monday 2nd 6:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Tuesday 3rd 11:00 AM – 10:00 PM
Camille Henrot’s latest film, Saturday, delves deep into what philosopher Ernst Bloch called “the principle of hope”, which structures our aspirations for immediate, private utopias as well as for radical change. The film showcases images of baptism rituals recorded by Henrot at Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Churches and headquarters. The SDA is an evangelical millenarian Christian denomination that celebrates Sabbath on Saturday worldwide. These images of baptism combined with footage of civil protests, neurological testing, cosmetic surgery, big wave surfing, endoscopic exams and food television commercials staged by the artist extend the perception of how hope manifests in our daily life. Shot mostly in 3D, the film reconstructs space through artificial perception. In doing so, the film uses the artificiality of 3D effect to question the documentary format itself, problematize the distance between object and subject, and elucidate how this technology complicates our relationship to truth. Headlines relating bad news scroll on the bottom of the screen but also penetrate the image throughout. The SDA’s obsession with diet and digital communication act as a mirror of modern capitalist society’s expectation for a better life, while echoing James Joyce’s idea of the “digestive value of religion.”
Bio
Camille 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. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian resulted in the film Grosse Fatigue, for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the 2015 Edvard Munch Award. In 2017, Henrot was given carte blanche at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she presented the major exhibition “Days Are Dogs”. Henrot has participated in the Lyon, Berlin and Sydney Biennials and exhibited at Schinkel Pavillon, Kunsthalle Wien and the New Museum. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2019) and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2020).
Camille Henrot was born in 1978. She lives and works in New York.