Exclusive works designed by Laure Prouvost for her carte blanche at the Mucem in Marseille, a series of immersive and poetic installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean,
photographed by Raphaël Massart for this cut-out book, between an artist's book and an exhibition catalogue, accompanied by drawings and critical texts.
For the Mucem, Laure Prouvost has created a series of immersive installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean. Repurposed everyday objects, glass sculptures, sound mirages, and underwater videos shot in the depths of the calanques and around Frioul compose a sensitive and poetic universe. Between fiction and reality, the artist invites visitors on a sensory journey where everything is transformed: forms, narratives, and life itself.
The book was conceived as a visual journey leading from the Old Port of Marseille to Fort Saint-Jean and into the very heart of each work. To recreate this encounter between artist Laure Prouvost and the Mucem, there is a constant dialogue between the exterior—the sea, the stone of the fort—and the interior—the intimacy of the installations that unfold in the air, in the bowels of the earth, and underwater... Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book captures this moment through photographic work carried out especially by Raphaël Massart and an evocative form designed by the artist: like a book that also floats in the Mediterranean. To accompany this visual unfolding, a booklet embedded in the heart of the book contains texts by Hélia Paukner, curator of the exhibition, and Mathilde Roman, art historian.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Mucem, Marseille, in 2025.
Laure Prouvost was born in Justelieu (France) in 1961, before moving to London, where she studied at Central Saint Martin's College, then Goldsmith College. She now lives between London, Antwerp and a caravan in the Croatian desert.
Her work adopts the form of independent stories that intersect and answer to each other, in which fiction mixes with reality. These situations become immersive installations, inviting escapism, in a dialogue between films, sculptures, paintings, tapestries, performances or fragmentary tales, sometimes addressed directly at visitors. Generous and full of humour, her work examines the relationships between language, image and perception, placing the visitors in situations of doubt and incomprehension, but also a wonder which is both intellectual and sensorial.
The winner of the Max Mara Art Prize in 2011 and of the Turner Prize in 2013, appointed to represent France at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, Laure Prouvost has had numerous solo exhibitions around the world.
