Laure Prouvost: Oma-je

“fr-fr-from the depths of my heart 
to the depths of the sea 
from high in the clouds, to my brain set free. 
in the womb of this galaxy”

Remai Modern is pleased to present Oma-je, acclaimed French artist Laure Prouvost’s largest exhibition to date in North America. The exhibition, which opened June 30 at the museum in Saskatoon, celebrates her relationship to family, friends and their loved ones, inspirational thinkers and activists, chosen kin and artistic predecessors including Jane Ash Poitras, Dodie Bellamy, Louise Bourgeois, Hélène Cixous, Marie Curie, Gathie Falk, Mia Haazen, Omas Gegen Rechts, Monica Imaimaa Iquliq, Joan Jonas, Kanayuk, Hilma af Klint, Gulli Kinnby, Eleni Kritou, John Latham, Denise Lefebvre, Doris Wall Larson, Audre Lorde, Ada Lovelace, Liz Magor, Ann Newdigate, Rosetta Nuotatore, Emmeline Pankhurst, Niki de Saint Phalle, Éliane Radigue, Odette Prouvost Leclercq, Felicita de la Rosa, Elisabeth Schimana, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, Barbara Steveni, Eugenie Tautoonie Kabluitok and Agnes Varda, amongst more than 100 others. Oma-je honours both intellectual inheritance and embodied ways of knowing. The exhibition shifts from Grandfather to Grandmother and forefather to foremother. Love, touch, and teaching are irreversibly entangled and celebrated.

Prouvost is known for her playful use of language, translation and transliteration, experimental narrated video, and immersive and surprising installations that transport visitors into unfamiliar worlds created largely from everyday objects. The exhibition will include iconic pieces by Prouvost such as Grandma’s Dream (2013), End Is Her Story (2017), This Means (2019), and Four For See Beauties (2022).

Oma-je also includes an immersive new work titled Here Her Heart Hovers (2023), which is co-commissioned by Remai Modern, Kunsthalle Wien and Wiener Festwochen. This installation focuses on the figure of the grandmother as an ancestor and trailblazer. The work transforms the gallery into a theatre of object relating to memory, imagination, and inheritance. Visitors are invited to travel through time and lose themselves in the dark, complex play between past and present, individual and society, and between modern and ancient concepts, relationships, materials and techniques.

There are three new films embedded in Here Her Heart Hovers. In You, My, Omma, Mama, nine women call out into the French coastal landscape for their grandmothers. Together the circle of friends hike into a cave where they reflect on potent memories of their oma, nona, granny, bobo, babushka, halmeoni, and yaya with personal and evocative objects in hand. A child performs a shadow play for Grandma, the magic oma in Shadow Does. The story told offers exciting, heartwarming and alarming details about the contemporary world. A Walking Story brings the nine women from You, My, Omma, Mama, back together around a campfire where their pithy reflections, like incantations, evoke memories of extraordinary foremothers who were drivers of social progress, equality, artistic innovation and scientific discovery. They call upon us to keep our hearts and minds open so that we can continue to give and receive from a flow of shared knowledge and experience.

The film screens float around the room as part of an ethereal installation of hanging mobiles that appear as birds and spirits above the ground and create enchanting shadow play around the entire room. In the center, a fire is burning. A voiceover tells stories of grandmothers, and beautifully crafted glass and found objects are gathered like characters around the fire. One foremother who served as an inspiration for this project is the iconic 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf. She is a powerful figure, amongst the earliest examples of figurative art that has been endlessly reinterpreted through time, and an important foremother to art as we know it. Each object gathered in Here Her Heart Hovers is a symbol or a memory of a beloved nana or revolution foremother. The entire environment is brought together by a newly commissioned composition by pioneering electronic musician and composer Elisabeth Schimana. The grandmothering celebrated in this exhibition is a verb, a practice of care, of mentorship, and of knowledge transfer rather than heredity or biology.

In addition to co-commissioning Here Her Heart Hovers, Remai Modern is delighted to have acquired This Means, a Murano glass sculpture depicting an octopus figure, on the advent of Oma-je. Through the artist’s practice, the octopus represents a maternal figure. With breasts for eyes, this octopus leaks the water (emotion) that is essential for life, and holds in her hands a bottle of milk, a glass (mother), an orange (love), a nail brush (excited), and a flat spanner (father).

Remai Modern would like to acknowledge the contributions of the Frank & Ellen Remai Foundation and the Consulate General of France in Vancouver for supporting this exhibition. 

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France (1978) and is currently based in Brussels. She received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Programme. Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013.