Laure Prouvost deploys a fabulous imagination that reflects our desire for emancipation, attention and escape. Her installations, which are often immersive, address our perceptions of ecological and migratory upheaval with a powerful dreamlike quality, and our ability to project ourselves into a shared future.

Oui Will Become One Another, a giant octopus washed up on the beach at Dunkirk, appears to be slowly making its way up the sea wall. This recurring figure in Laure Prouvost’s universe has the specificity of containing its sensory and cerebral organs in its tentacles. The octopus, one of whose tentacles wears a bird’s mask, comes here to meet the city and its inhabitants. Now a hybrid form, the animal reflects the artist’s interest in the notion of fluidity and interdependence between living beings.

Twenty kilometres away, on the Belgian coast of La Panne, another octopus emerges from the dunes. It too is brandishing an aphorism as its standard. To change the usual meaning of words, to look at the horizon from the perspective of the octopus, to arouse the desire to touch, to hide and, why not, to cross the border? Laure Prouvost creates spaces where vital energies circulate.

With Oui Will Become One Another, a nod to the Dunkirk Carnival, the artist invites us to melt into one another, to become other, to become one with what surrounds us.

A native of the Nord region, Laure Prouvost has exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennale, where she represented France in 2019, in Belgium, where she currently lives, and elsewhere in the world.