Vous les Entendez? [Do You Hear Them?]: Laura Lamiel’s Solo Exhibition at Palais de Tokyo
Laura Lamiel, Honey on a Knife (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
Exhibition View, Laura Lamiel, Vous les Entendez? (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
On an expanse of shattered glass, nitrous oxide cartridges and small metallic objects are scattered. In the center, a chair is balancing on one leg as pushed by an imaginary gust of wind. Displayed in the basement space of Parisian museum Palais de Tokyo, Honey on a Knife is the installation welcoming the visitors to French artist Laura Lamiel solo exhibition Vous les entendez ? [Do You Hear Them?].
Laura Lamiel, Honey on a Knife (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
Bringing together a collection of existing pieces and new productions, spanning from painting to installation, photography, video or drawings, this exhibition pay homage to the incredible work of the 80-year-old artist. For more than four decades, Laura Lamiel has been crafting a body of work characterized by a unique formal consistency, delving into various states of perception, cognition, and emotion. Through the artful arrangement and juxtaposition of found objects, raw materials, colors, and lights, her creations unveil spaces that straddle both the tangible and the psychological.
“Can you hear them, all those multiple identities of our humanity? ”, said Laura Lamiel in a discussion with Yoann Gourmel, the exhibition’s curator. Drawing inspiration from one of Nathalie Sarraute’s books, the exhibition’s title encapsulates how Lamiel's artistic body of work unfolds through echoes, or buzzes but also through silences and respirations. Punctuated by auditive pieces accompanying the viewer’s visit —such as the distant sound of glass being smashed or recordings made on the banks of the Ganges River [India]—, the exhibition was designed by the artist as a unified installation engaging in a harmonious dialogue with the museum's architecture.
Laura Lamiel, In the Folds (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
To the visitor's eyes then appear at Dans les plis, [In the Folds], a metal sculpture stretching seven meters long. Looking like a library with shelves, the piece is packed with 300 kg of compressed fabrics adorned with the inscription Rien n’est à faire, tout est à défaire [Nothing to be done, everything to be undone]. “It's a bit of a heavy-handed metaphor, but you could say that women have always been constrained, and that linen is part of that constraint too. [...] This condition is indeed to be undone…” explains Lamiel.
Her art works being more than often embedded with political statements, Laura Lamiel is also presenting a series of ‘cellules’ installations seeming to have been extracted from living spaces. Those steel structure enclosed by mirrored walls were first created at the Musée de Grenoble in 2000, when, detaching herself from the painting and the wall, she grabbed two copper plates and clamped them together to form an angle. The result is small cabins you can’t enter, and must turn around while being reflected in it. Thought on a body scale, these artworks carry embedded political connotations as the artist explains, “I wanted to talk about the separation of spaces, how difficult it is for people to live apart in such harsh environments, and how difficult it is to move from one space to another.”
Exhibition View, Laura Lamiel, Vous les Entendez? (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
As a mother of two kids, Lamiel did not always have a studio space to create, but this never kept her from it. Seeing her work as an organic piece she would never stop, she references German artist Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: a lifelong structure in which his works and those of his friends were embedded. Lamiel then explains, “I said to myself that I was going to make a work that saves you from everything. A work that tells you that you can always work, that you can always be in resistance […] that you can both build and have an organic relationship with the elements you bring in and move around.”
Exhibition View, Laura Lamiel, Vous les Entendez? (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo. Photo: Aurélien Mole.