In Conversation: Camille Henrot, Legacy Russell & Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi on ‘Grosse Fatigue’

Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Camille Henrot’s film ‘Grosse Fatigue’, which won the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, we joined Henrot, artist Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and Executive Director & Chief Curator at The Kitchen, Legacy Russell for a screening of the film followed by a conversation.
‘Grosse Fatigue’ critiques the universalist ambition to represent the totality of the world, a guiding principle that underpins many museum collections. To create the film, Henrot searched through the Smithsonian archives for material that would reference creation stories from scientific, hermetic, and oral discourses. The fragments and objects sourced and filmed by Henrot appear in the film within different computer desktop windows opening and closing, each with its own frame of reference. The accumulation of layered windows draws a parallel between museums’ drive to acquire and contemporary consumer culture. Henrot describes the collage editing style as an ‘intuitive unfolding of knowledge’, or an ‘experience of density itself’-meant to highlight the very limits of the way we take in information. The film is structured around a poem voiced by multidisciplinary artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, and written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg, with music by Joakim Bouaziz. The 13-minute film has since been included in exhibitions globally, and ARTnews named it one of the most important artworks of the 2010s.
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Hauser & Wirth is an international contemporary and modern art gallery with spaces in Zurich, London, Somerset, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Gstaad, St. Moritz, Monaco, Menorca and Paris.
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