Laure Prouvost: Oma-je

PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal

Public Opening
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

Exhibition
November 1, 2024 – March 9, 2025

The PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Oma-je, the largest North American exhibition to date by acclaimed French artist Laure Prouvost, opening to the public on November 1, 2024. This touring show has evolved from its 2023 iteration at Remai Modern in Saskatoon and will unfold as a journey across seven of the PHI Foundation’s galleries in Montréal. This immersive presentation celebrates Prouvost’s relationship to family, friends, and their loved ones, as well as inspirational thinkers, activists, chosen kin, and artistic predecessors. Oma-je honours both intellectual inheritance and embodied ways of knowing, shifting attention from grandfather to grandmother and forefather to foremother. Love, touch, and teaching are irreversibly entangled and celebrated.

Laure Prouvost’s Inspirations

The exhibition celebrates, references, or features exceptional figures such as Louise Bourgeois, Hélène Cixous, Marie Curie, Mia Haazen, Omas Gegen Rechts, Joan Jonas, Hilma af Klint, Gulli Kinnby, Eleni Kritou, Denise Lefebvre, 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 Agnès Varda, amongst more than 100 others.

About the Exhibition

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

Oma-je also includes an enveloping new work titled Here Her Heart Hovers (2023), which has been co-commissioned by Remai Modern, Kunsthalle Wien, and Wiener Festwochen. This installation focuses on the figure of the grandmother as both ancestor and trailblazer, transforming the gallery into a theatre of objects 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 recent films embedded in Here Her Heart Hovers. In You, My, Omma, Mama (2023), nine women call out into the French coastal landscape for their grandmothers. Together, the circle of friends ventures into a cave where they reflect on potent memories of their oma, nonna, granny, bobo, babushka, halmeoni, and yaya, with personal and evocative objects in hand. A child performs a shadow play for Great Grandma, the magic oma in Shadow Does (2023). The story told offers exciting, heartwarming, and alarming details about the contemporary world. A Walking Story (2023) 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.

Acknowledgments

The exhibition is organized by Remai Modern, Saskatoon, curated by Aileen Burns, Co-Executive Director & CEO at Remai Modern, and developed for the PHI Foundation in dialogue with Cheryl Sim, Director and Chief Curator at the PHI Foundation.

Laure Prouvost: Oma-je was originally presented at Remai Modern with the support of the Frank & Ellen Remai Foundation and the Consulate General of France in Vancouver.

The PHI Foundation gratefully acknowledges the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Tourisme Montréal, and the Consulat général de France à Québec for their support.

About Laure Prouvost

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France, in 1978 and is currently based in Brussels, Belgium. She received her BFA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths’ College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Artists Programme. Prouvost won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013.

About Aileen Burns

Aileen Burns, together with Johan Lundh, has been Co-Executive Director at Remai Modern in Saskatoon since 2020. She has held similar positions at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand; the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland. As a director by profession but an exhibition-maker at heart, she has curated and co-curated more than 50 exhibitions, including the Turner Prize exhibition with Prouvost in 2013. Other artists she has worked closely with include Gordon Bennett, Ruth Buchanan, Céline Condorelli, D Harding, Christine Sun Kim, Karrabing Film Collective, P. Staff, Amalia Pica, Slavs and Tatars, Hito Steyerl, and Haegue Yang. She studied at Columbia University, New York City in 2010. Prior to that, she completed her BA in Art History and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto.

PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art

Established in 2007 by Phoebe Greenberg, the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing impactful contemporary art experiences to the public. Our programming is international in scope, responsive to the local context, and free of charge to reinforce a commitment to accessibility and inclusion. The Foundation is driven by a desire to break down entrenched perceptions of what contemporary art is and who it is for, with the fundamental belief that art is for us all. The Foundation endeavours to make a home for art, artists and the public we serve, devoted to nurturing convivial exchanges that celebrate art as part of our everyday lives.

PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art
451 & 465 Saint-Jean Street
Montréal, Quebec, H2Y 2R5
Canada

Opening hours
Wednesday to Friday: 12 pm to 7 pm
Saturday and Sunday: 11 am to 6 pm
Free Admission

Accessibility: Partially Accessible

Information
514-849-3742
info.foundation@phi.ca
foundation.phi.ca

Media inquiries
Myriam Achard
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514-844-7474 #5104

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Image credits:
Laure Prouvost, This Means, 2019. Glass, nailbrush, steel, pump, water, 203 x 180 x 180 cm. Courtesy the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid. Photo: Trevor Good / carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid