The Wanderer

Synopsis

“When I double speak, laughing and vomiting by the swing-bridge, then my language exits through a trapdoor.”

In Laure Prouvost’s feature film The Wanderer, a character undergoes a series of increasingly bizarre and mysterious experiences. As he tries to hold onto reality, it seems to melt from under him. The Wanderer is based on a text by artist Rory Macbeth, who translated a Kafka novella from German into English without any knowledge of the German language and without a dictionary. On the way between languages, the original narrative is transformed, if not lost, in translation.

The Wanderer was commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England.

Bio:

Born in Croix-Lille, France, in 1978, Laure Prouvost graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2002. Since then her work has been exhibited extensively across the UK and internationally. In her installations and films she sets out to unbalance the relationship between language and understanding. She charms and wins over the viewer with an initially amusing narrative which she then quickly subverts with other implicit or irrelevant stories, gradually endowing her works with asurrealistic dimension. Prouvost has increasingly developed work that spills out of the frame of her previous medium of film. Her installations aim to create a portal to her cinematic environments, breaking free of their frames, becoming a celebration of imperfection and conjuring a state before we can talk about anything. Laure Prouvost won the 2013 Turner Prize for the exhibitions ‘FarFromWords’ at Whitechapel Gallery, London and ‘Wantee’ as part of ‘Schwitters in Britain’, Tate Britain, London. In 2011 she won the ‘MaxMara Art Prize for Women’. Laure Prouvost is represented by MOTInternational and her videos are distributed by LUX.

Read more:

Interview with Laure Prouvost in The White Review

Focus on Laure Prouvost, Nick Aikens in Frieze Magazine

Laure Prouvost: Excited in Slow Motion, Kathy Noble in Afterall