CAMILLE HENROT
Born in 1978
The practice of Camille Henrot 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. Camille Henrot’s film Saturday (2017) delves into what philosopher Ernst Bloch called “the principle of hope,” which structures our aspirations for immediate, private utopias as well as for radical change. The film focuses on the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church, an evangelical millenarian Christian denomination that celebrates the Sabbath and practices baptism rituals on Saturday. Shot mostly in 3D, the film combines images of civil protests, neurological testing, cosmetic surgery, endoscopic exams and staged food television commercials with scenes shot at SDA Church sites in the USA and Polynesia. Meanwhile, a news ticker of headlines from selected news occurring on Saturdays throughout a year scroll the bottom of the screen and interweave themselves in front of and behind the subjects in the frame. By looking at the SDA through the lens of its digital media operations, Saturday shows how the church mirrors preoccupations which proliferate on social media, such as fitness, optimism and transparency. These obsessions act as a mirror of modern capitalist society’s aspiration for a better life, while echoing James Joyce’s idea of the “digestive value of religion.”