Purple Television

[February 3 2014] : art

An excerpt from Wantee (2013) by Laure Prouvost

Ahead of her first solo show in America at the New Museum we take a look at an excerpt from Wantee the Turner Prize 2013 winning video work from French artist Laure Prouvost. The exceptional video describe the fictional relationship between Prouvost’s grandfather and Kurt Schwitters, the exiled German collagist and performance artist. Wantee was commissioned by Grizedale Arts and the Tate to feature in a Kurt Schwitters retrospective at Tate Britain earlier last year. Her grandfather’s last artwork, we learn from the film, involved digging a tunnel underneath his home which heads towards Africa, down which he eventually disappears. Prouvost built a grubby cabin in the Lake District, where her fictional grandad ostensibly lived, cramming it with junk and capturing it all on film. Prouvost’s unique approach to filmmaking, often situated within atmospheric installations, employs strong story telling, quick cuts, montage and deliberate misuse of language to create surprising and unpredictable work. This combination of images, objects, and enviroment is what cemented her place to win the Turner Prize 2013. On why the piece is called Wantee Prouvost explains in an interview with The Guardian, “Schwitters had a girlfriend who asked visitors if they wanted tea so much that he ended up calling her Wantee.”

Wantee is screening at the “Laure Prouvost: For Forgetting” exhibition on view at the New Museum from February 12th – April 13th, 2014

Curated by Margot Norton, Assistant Curator

Courtesy of the artist and MOTINTERNATIONAL, London and Brussels