Camille Henrot: Mother Tongue (2020/2021)

Digital archival print on Epson Hot Press Natural 330g/m2 paper
24.00 x 18.00 in
61.0 x 45.7 cm
Edition of 50

Signed and numbered by the Artist on front

Artspace & Phaidon, in partnership with Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, are pleased to announce a new limited edition by Camille Henrot, entitled Mother Tongue (2021). Created exclusively to benefit MOCA through a unique Artspace editions initiative, proceeds from the sale of Mother Tongue will support programming at the museum for the coming year.

Mother Tongue shares its title with Henrot’s current solo exhibition of new works at the Kestner Gesselschaft, in Hanover, Germany, and can be read in various ways—by design. Its rich visual beauty belies a deeper inquiry into the nature of humanity itself. Referencing language as a means of appropriation, and the mouth as a site of both expression and consumption, Mother Tongue drives cracks into the iconic art historical trope of mother and child. Its intentional ambiguity sparks existential questions about instinctual and imposed attachment, affection, and alienation that, for many, have risen to the forefront of our awareness during a year of quarantine.

To me, parenting is a very interesting source for material because of its messiness. It’s complex and ambivalent and unstable. There is tenderness but there is also anger. There is attraction but there is also repulsion. And if you pull on these strings, everything comes together: sexuality, love, death, and much more. — Camille Henrot

ABOUT MOCA
Founded in 1979, MOCA is the defining museum of contemporary art. In a relatively short period of time, MOCA has achieved astonishing growth; a world-class permanent collection of more than 7,000 objects, international in scope and among the finest in the world; hallmark education programs that are widely-emulated; award-winning publications that present original scholarship; groundbreaking monographic, touring, and thematic exhibitions of international repute that survey the art of our time; and cutting-edge engagement with modes of new media production. MOCA is a not-for-profit institution in Los Angeles, California that relies on a variety of funding sources for its activities.

The practice of French artist Camille Henrot (b. 1978 in Paris, France) moves seamlessly between film, painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. The artist references self-help, online second-hand marketplaces, cultural anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, and social media to question what it means to be at once a private individual and a global subject. Henrot is interested in confronting emotional and political issues, and looking at how ideology, globalization, belief and new media are interacting to create an environment of structural anxiety. The changing modes of information distribution and interpersonal connections, the relationships between individual experiences and macroscopic dynamics, as well as between images and language, are at the center of her works. Henrot lives and works in New York and Berlin.

A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute resulted in her film Grosse Fatigue, for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the 2015 Edvard Munch Award. In 2017, Henrot was given carte blanche at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she presented the major exhibition “Days Are Dogs."" Henrot has had additional solo exhibitions at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany; New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; New Orleans Museum of Art; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. Upcoming solo exhibitions include the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2021) and Middelheim Museum in Antwerp, Belgium (2022). She has also participated in the Lyon, Berlin and Sydney Biennials and will present new works in the Liverpool Biennale (2021).