Screening & Conversation: Camille Henrot, Legacy Russell & Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi on 'Grosse Fatigue'

Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Camille Henrot’s film ‘Grosse Fatigue’, which won the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, please join us for a screening of the film followed by a talk with Henrot, artist Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and Executive Director & Chief Curator at The Kitchen, Legacy Russell.

‘Grosse Fatigue’ critiques the universalist ambition to represent the totality of the world, a guiding principle that underpins many museum collections. To create the film, Henrot searched through the Smithsonian archives for material that would reference creation stories from scientific, hermetic, and oral discourses. The fragments and objects sourced and filmed by Henrot appear in the film within different computer desktop windows opening and closing, each with its own frame of reference. The accumulation of layered windows draws a parallel between museums’ drive to acquire and contemporary consumer culture. Henrot describes the collage editing style as an ‘intuitive unfolding of knowledge’, or an ‘experience of density itself’ – meant to highlight the very limits of the way we take in information. The film is structured around a poem voiced by multidisciplinary artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, and written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg, with music by Joakim Bouaziz. The 13-minute film has since been included in exhibitions globally, and ARTnews named it one of the most important artworks of the 2010s.

‘Grosse Fatigue’
by Camille Henrot
Video (color, sound)
2013
13 min

Original music by Joakim
 Bouaziz
Voice by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh
Text written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg
Producer: kamel mennour, Paris; with the additional support of Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris 
Production: Silex Films
Film presented on the occasion of“Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace) 55th International Art Exhibition-LaBiennale di Venezia, 2013 
Project conducted as part of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program, Washington, D.C.

Special thanks to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum 
©ADAGP Camille Henrot. Courtesy the artist, Silex Films and kamelmennour, Paris/London.

This event is free, however, due to limited space, reservations are recommended.

Click here to register.

About Camille Henrot
The practice of French artist Camille Henrot moves seamlessly between film, painting, drawing, bronze, sculpture, and installation. Henrot draws upon references from literature, psychoanalysis, social media, cultural anthropology, self-help, and the banality of everyday life in order to qu estion what it means to be both a private individual and a global subject. Born in 1978 in Paris, France. The artist lives and works in New York City.

About Legacy Russell
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of the experimental new media, art, and performance institution The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally.

About Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is a Milky Way-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of film, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary research. Her recent body of work explores the epistemological, aesthetic, and political possibilities of the moving image at the intersections of art and science, documentary and fiction, personal/prosthetic memory and individual/collective histories. Having studied Fine Arts at the Städelschule and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is currently pursuing PhD research in Film at the University of Westminster. Thuy-Han’s work has been presented in both the art and cinema context, including Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Atletika, Vilnius; Belvedere 21, Vienna; Centro di Musica Contemporanea di Milano, Milan; De Appel, Amsterdam; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Sàn Art, Saigon; Villa Medici, Rome; Whitechapel Gallery, London; 12th Berlin Biennale; 20th Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival; 60th New York Film Festival; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; 20th Reykjavík International Film Festival; 33rd Singapore International Film Festival; among other spaces. She is working on her first feature-length film.