Camille Henrot

Saturday focuses on the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church, an evangelical Christian denomination with an apocalyptic expectation, that celebrates the Sabbath and practices immersion baptism rituals on Saturday. Through the figure of the SDA Church appear the themes of hope for a better life and the desire to flee the daily mundane, which here manifests in a religious mode, but takes form elsewhere in the practice of particular dietary rules and extreme sports. Shot mostly in 3D, the film combines scenes recorded at SDA Church sites in the USA, Polynesia, and the Kingdom of Tonga with images of food, surfing, and medical tests; together, they immerse us in a parallel world of hope and belief – of transparencies and opacities. Meanwhile, text scrolling at the bottom of the screen materializes both a source of information and a desire to escape from it.

Regimes of dominance and subjugation are explored in Tuesday, which interweaves footage of racehorses being groomed before and after training with scenes of Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighters interlocked in combat. In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art developed from Judo, which focuses on grappling and ground fighting, positions of dominance and weakness form a dynamic structure in which physical strength is not a decisive criterion. Power structures are translated into a sporting struggle with an open output, in which the roles of domination and submission are reversed from one moment to the next. Shot primarily in slow motion, the competitive nature of the jiu-jitsu fighters and racehorses is paralysed by an extreme aestheticization, transforming scenes of action into objects of contemplation and visual pleasure.

A looped video, part of the City of Ys sculptural installation series by Camille Henrot.

A looped video, part of the City of Ys sculptural installation series by Camille Henrot.

A looped video, part of the City of Ys sculptural installation series by Camille Henrot.

A looped video, part of the City of Ys sculptural installation series by Camille Henrot.

A looped video, part of the City of Ys sculptural installation series by Camille Henrot.

With Grosse fatigue, Camille Henrot set herself the challenge of telling the story of the universe’s creation. Indeed, the fatigue is grosse, or hugely weighty, she who has condemned herself to carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders like the Titan Atlas. But aren’t such dark and lonely burdens meant to become as light, as beautiful and fragile as soap bubbles in the hands of an artist? Holding the world in the palm of her hand… it floats effortlessly at the palm’s surface as though, imbued with magical powers, the artist has truly resurrected the youth of humanity from the depths of the ages – bringing to life the magisterial dawn we had thought too far off to ever be seen again, yet which captivates us as easily as a magic lantern does a child.

Million Dollars Point is the name of a dive site on Santo Island, in Vanuatu, a lagoon that had become an underwater cemetery for hundreds of tanks and canons abandoned by the U.S. army after World War II. The site was named after the amount offered by the natives to buy this war material out, brand new but already outdated. The film Million Dollars Point juxtaposes the images of this submarine battlefield with footage of a local music video showing a French mustached man dancing and singing on a Pacific beach with Polynesian girls at his side.

The piece is inspired both by Carl Jung’s idea of India as a "dreamlike world" and by Sudhir Kadar’s analysis of India as “the unconscious of the West”. The film is composed in a braided structure, interweaving a pilgrimage, the production of anti-anxiety medication and the extraction of snake venom, all of which are linked to human strategies of defence against fear. In this film, as in numerous other popular myths, fear is incarnated by an animal. The image of the snake, an ambivalent symbol in many cultures (both lethal and protective), is used in this film as a recurring symbol of the most archetypal fears and their ability to be transformed in order to take part in the process of creation. The snake appears furtively through various works of art, as an obsessional, baroque and versatile icon. It becomes a thread between the East and the West, and contradicts the theoretical separation between these two cultural spheres.

The 'Film spatial' proposes a subjective visit to Yona Friedman's apartment Yona Friedman is an 86 year old visionary architect and urbanist. His work has overthrown the dominating position of the architect as well as the established link between citizens with their cities, and of man and his environment. Unlike how one conceives of an architect's apartment nowadays, Yona Friedman's space can be perceived from an erratic point of view or angle, which could be the one of his dog, Baltkis, who is the key figure of Yonas Friedman's universe. Through the exploration of a floating universe tinged with mysteries,'Film spatial' invites one to another way of perceiving the world, freed from intellectual and conceptual conformism.

In Deep Inside, Camille Henrot's first film, a pornographic film is transformed into a voyeuristic, lovelorn ballad. Drawn frame by frame on the 35mm film stock of a 70s pornographic film, the sexual content is partially revealed and partially hidden by black animated forms that seem to be fugitive memories of an old love. The music is slow and harrowing like a howl for love. The artist works with marker as one might use a stencil, revealing part of the original film in the drawing's negative space. By combining pornographic and sentimental expression, the film posits that emotional misery is also physical. Sexual excitation and heartache are both based on an alternation of empty and full, presence and absence, hidden and revealed things. This manipulated film creates ambiguous images where scopophilia is no longer based on tactile frustration.

In Deep Inside, Camille Henrot's first film, a pornographic film is transformed into a voyeuristic, lovelorn ballad. Drawn frame by frame on the 35mm film stock of a 70s pornographic film, the sexual content is partially revealed and partially hidden by black animated forms that seem to be fugitive memories of an old love. The music is slow and harrowing like a howl for love. The artist works with marker as one might use a stencil, revealing part of the original film in the drawing's negative space. By combining pornographic and sentimental expression, the film posits that emotional misery is also physical. Sexual excitation and heartache are both based on an alternation of empty and full, presence and absence, hidden and revealed things. This manipulated film creates ambiguous images where scopophilia is no longer based on tactile frustration.

In the original horror movie The Night of the Living-Dead, a young girl is followed by an army of zombies. In Dying Living Woman, her character has been scratched out, image by image. Physically erased, she is even more visible, glowing with a surnatural light. The fictional character is erased, but her disapearance haunts the film.

In the original horror movie The Night of the Living-Dead, a young girl is followed by an army of zombies. In Dying Living Woman, her character has been scratched out, image by image. Physically erased, she is even more visible, glowing with a surnatural light. The fictional character is erased, but her disapearance haunts the film.

Camille Henrot’s work reveales, by it’s handcraft production process using scratching on filmroll, the materiality of the filmic support, thus altered. The artist often appropriates herself existing movies to make a video in animattion drawing, unlike Lansky that was made with a blank color film made black by simple light exposure. Paying a tribute to electro-acoustic composer Paul Lansky, this video is joint together in a mathematic like shooting script of musical sequences made by Benjamin Morando and François Goujon (Octet) after the famous piece Ilde Catter (1985). To each musical sequence corresponds an animation sequence which, far from a strictly narrative linearity, could as well be alterned or loop. One thinks (s)he catches sight of a bees swarm or of crying ghosts, but they vanish to give place to the more emotionate universe of a childhood reminiscent of melancholy. Verane Pina

The members of a spaceship crew are attacked by monsters from another dimension. In Metawolf, naive "trash" drawing modifies the stereotypical science-fiction image. From trailer to music video, this Hollywood movie is infested with the artist’s drawings, which are transforming it into a mutant object.

The film is a little sadistic, as its aim is to remove the "full view" of the film, reversing the advertising slogan "Gimme more!" for the Cinemascope format. The sound is a long whistling. The original film is an orientalist peplum called The New Adventures of Ali Baba, typical of the cinemascope genre movies with many extras, wide shots and muscle-bound male torsos. The film's image slowly shrinks until it becomes a narrow band and disappears completely.