Laurence Vauthier, biography, install shots, exhibitions, artworks, sculptures, installations, performances

Born in 1993. Lives and works Paris (FR).

« While the genre of performance was undergoing and impressive extension in contemporary arts, its limits and unity were undoubtedly blurred; the spheres linked to sports and games talk more and more in the languages of performance (to the detriment of exploits, of achievements, of results and records); and economy like the business culture which itself hunts continuously for performance wherever it can.
Laurence Vauthier noticed this recent ambiguous fortune that the notion has received and decided to deliberately cross its different fields of application. As such she created a performance in which she is evaluated by a human resources director: where one can seize with a worrying pleasure that the terms used in administrative evaluations can easily apply to artistic activities (should it not itself perform well?).
With less critical irony and more stylistic flair, Laurence invents the person of an artist interviewing sport coaches, gets encouraged by long term featured presenters, signs autographs by world champions, while exposing bridge mats or billiard tables in the style of a support/surface (: sport/surface) or embroiders two towels with the paradoxically synonymous expressions of Give your all and Never give up (conceptual art + televised exhortation). This person of an artist is also a duplicate for the citizens that we are tendentially called upon to be in our continually competing society, a being that is essentially defined by performance.
Laurence produced nine examples of a ceramic that reproduces a special urinal allowing women to urinate standing: with finesse, it reintroduces sexual difference there where the rules of performance tend to try and conceal it … »

Joseph Mouton