PICA celebrated International Women’s Day 2025 with curator-led tours of two exhibitions. Curator Annika Kristensen presented an introduction to Oui Move In You by Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost, followed by PICA CEO Hannah Mathews who led a tour of In Her Footsteps: A Tribute to Matrilineal Legacy, a group exhibition honouring the influence of women across generations.
[Hannah Mathews] Welcome everyone, It’s really lovely to see you all here today on International Women’s Day. To begin, I’d like to acknowledge the country we’re on – Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. It’s real privilege to live and work on this country. We take a lot of pride in being able to do that and I’d like to acknowledge the traditional and ongoing custodians of Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, the ongoing custodians, and welcome all First Nations people who are joining us today. For those of you who I may not have met before, my name is Hannah Mathews. I’m the director at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. PICA is a multi arts organisation, that was essentially born and has grown up in this building over 35 years ago. We work with artists from the time they graduate, over multiple decades and work with them in multiple ways. Exhibitions, performance, studios, learning, the whole kit and caboodle. We’re always thinking about how we can support artists through a lifelong practice. We program four seasons throughout the year, and this is our first artistic season. For 2025, it falls in the Bunuru season, so the second summer, and it’s always in partnership with the Perth Festival and for PICA that means a really important opportunity to connect local WA artists with international artists and to have international conversations going on. This season is focused around women, the stories of women and the importance of intergenerational connection and sharing. Everything that you’ll experience in building today has been programmed and brought together with that lens in mind. So even if you don’t know the artists or you’re not familiar with what we do here, keep those thoughts in mind as we move throughout the building, and it’ll give you a way to engage with the works that you may not be familiar with.
It’s a real pleasure to welcome Annika Kristensen. We worked together at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne a long time ago, but Annika is a WA local who has recently returned. She was formerly curator at ACCA, more recently at Perth Festival, and is now freelancing and doing many wonderful things. Annika is also the guest curator of the ground floor exhibition that we’re going to hear about today, which is a solo exhibition of Laure Prouvost. Today this session is really about hearing more from women, hearing more about their important stories and enjoying yourself while you’re here. Thanks, Annika.
[Annika Kristensen] Thanks Hannah and thank you all for coming. I’d also like to begin by acknowledging the Whadjuk Noongar people as traditional owners of the land that we’re on today, particularly as we think about matriarchal legacies and our ancestors and the people that have come before. I want to begin by saying that as curator of this exhibition, I am a terrible substitute for the artist. I really do wish that she could be here to talk about this exhibition in her own words. Laure is an incredibly whimsical, very creative person for whom art and life are very closely linked. She’s also much better at leaving a lot more room left for the imagination than we get trained to do as curators, so there’ll be times I’ll be quite literal in ways that Laure would not be. If you are interested in Laure and interested to learn more about her and her practice and process I would really encourage you to hop online and engage with some video interviews, or with some podcasts. There you can actually hear Laure talking directly about her work, which will give you a really great insight into some of the things in much more poetic way than I am able to. There’s a really fantastic podcast that she recorded with e-flux following the screening of multiple works of hers in New York. There is also a recorded in-conversation that I did with her at ACMI in Melbourne last year, as part of her show at ACCA, and that followed a screening of a work called They Parleiant Idéale, which Laure showed at the Venice Biennale in 2019 when she represented France at the Biennale. Oui Move In You was an exhibition that really was six years in gestation. I had the pleasure of meeting Laure in 2018 in Paris. She had a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo and I extended the invitation to her to come and create a new body of work for an exhibition in Melbourne in 2020. And of course, nothing went to plan that year. The exhibition was postponed twice over,finally opening in Melbourne in March 2024 and has toured now to PICA as part of Perth Festival this year.
The title Oui Move in You immediately gives you a clue into one of the central themes of Laure’s work, which is language, communication and the possibilities of mistranslation. ‘Oui’ of course being the French word for yes, but also when said aloud sounds like the collective word ‘we’ – as in all of us. Laure was born in France in 1978 in Lille and by her own admission really struggled with language at school. She found that she was unable to express herself in French, which she found a really rigid and prescribed language system, and she often attributes that difficulty to the reason why she became an artist. She found she could express herself much more readily in colour or gesture and movement than she could in words. When she was 18, she moved to London, where she studied at Goldsmiths College and Central St. Martins, and she spent a long part of her career there. Her foundation as an artist was established in London, where of course she was also an outsider, speaking a second language. Now she lives in Brussels, a very multicultural city, in which many languages are spoken, including in her own household. Laure speaks French, her partner is English, her children speak many, many languages, so she feels very much like someone who is between languages all the time and that position as an outsider gives her the advantage of looking at words as if they are objects. She speaks of words being a material like clay that can be manipulated. Rather than being afraid of words and rebelling against them towards the purely visual, she’s embraced language as an inherent interest and form within her work. You’ll see this in the titling of all of her exhibitions, and all of the titles of her work, there’s always this play on language and words. More literally, Oui Move In You is a reference to the sum total of our life experiences and the ways that things that we experience, both good or bad, continue to play out within us over time. Laure’s interested in the roles of grandmothers or female relations, be they biological relations or symbolic or imagined figures that inspired us in some way or other. For Laure, these might be artists like Louise Bourgeois or Carolee Schneeman or Agnes Vada, Nikki de Sant Phalle and others. But they might also be your peer groups, your friends, your families, the people that have influenced us and set the path to encourage us to grow up in our own terms. I also want to talk about the archetypal roles of the Grandfather and Grandmother, because there was a work at ACCA that we haven’t included in this exhibition, a film called Wantee from 2013, for which Laure won the Turner Prize. The figures of Granddad and Grandma have reappeared throughout Laure’s work. This show here focuses very much on Grandma, but Granddad was really important, too.
I mention him because Laure had studied under an important British conceptual artist called John Latham when she was at Goldsmiths. She worked as a studio assistant for him and was very inspired by him while at the same time coming up as a female artist. In looking at the largely male-dominated Western art historical canon of the 20th century and thinking about how she might work within, or against, that context, she created the character of Granddad. If Laure were here, she’d be talking about Granddad as if Granddad was really her granddad. He’s not, and neither is Grandma – spoiler alert there. The character of Granddad for Laure was a conceptual artist, and the work Wantee tells the story of her granddad, who goes missing in a tunnel that he’s digging from his house in the Lake District in Britain, trying to dig towards Africa. He’s been in the tunnel for many days, she is getting worried, her grandma is getting worried, they’ve lost Grandpa. The longer that Granddad is missing, the more the role of Grandma comes more to the fore. Grandma’s grief is channelled into reappropriating Grandpa’s paintings as tea trays or functional objects. Or she begins to decorate them with motifs that we might think about as connected to feminine subjectivities, boobs or bums or flowers, which are all motifs that reappear throughout Laure’s work. Here, Granddad is still in the depths of the tunnel. Grandma is emerging to the fore, and that’s where we began for the ACCA show. For PICA, we haven’t included Wantee, we’ve looked very much at a different kind of journey, sort of a life cycle that really begins with pre-birth into childhood, through to the role of matriarchs and grandmothers, cycling back to childhood again. But it’s important to understand that backstory of Granddad and why now it’s Grandma’s turn.
Laure has a really strong interest in ideas of journeying and trespassing. So, when we were thinking about this exhibition, we were thinking about how to translate the show at ACCA for the architecture here at PICA. As with her desire to work against the restrictions of language, she’s always really interested in how you can create your own path orrebel against the systems that dictate how we live our life. We took inspiration from that in how we conceived of the entrance to this exhibition. If you haven’t been in yet, we’re inviting people to enter through an alternative entrance rather than through the traditional entrance to the main gallery. Up these stairs is a back-of-house storeroom area that has previously been inaccessible to the public, and this is really where the journey into this exhibition begins. Laure’s work started off in film, but increasingly throughout the years she has expanded her practice to include painting, sculpture, performance… but installation has become a very important concern for her, particularly installation around her filmic works so it becomes a total experience. She wants you as viewers to have a physical encounter for the work, where you have some agency and experience. So right from the get-go here, as the audience you are trespassing somewhere you shouldn’t be, down the corridor. You go then through a very tightly suspended corridor of red velvet curtains that’s quite disorientating anddiscombobulating and are birthed into the first work called Four for See Beauties. In this first work that you encounter is in a red room, red wall, red carpet, red furnishings. It’s emblematic of what the experience of being in a womb might be like. In previous exhibitions, Laure has shown this work and requested of the gallery: “please turn your air conditioning off – I want it to be very warm in there,” to mimic the kind of internal warmth of the body, which is not something we have to worry about working at PICA in the height of summer with no air conditioning. But I mention it just to give you a sense of how deeply she thinks about the installation environment that she creates around her work. This first work really is introducing us to the origins of life. It’s returning us to a being like a fish. The experience of a fish, imagining swimming in a womb, considering ideas of gestation, birth, pre-consciousness, pre-verbal communication and they ways in which we communicate with our caregivers without language. One of key figures in the work is a newborn baby and that is Laure’s daughter Esme Blue, who was six months old at the time of making this work. Laure made this work while on a residency. While the work is made from the experience of a woman who herself is thinking about ideas of gestation and birth, which is increasingly a subject in contemporary art but still kind of taboo for a female artist to be dealing with, she also just included Esme out of practicality. She was like, “I have this baby with me. What am I going to do? I can’t hand her over. I might as well just make a work about her.” Laure’s voice also features prominently, which she thinks about this in a similarly practical way: because she always has her voice with her wherever she goes, she can use it as a tool for making her work. This also introduces you to another key concern within Laure’s work, which is sound. While she works predominantly with visual imagery, she considers sound as being equal to, if not more important than, the visual imagery that she’s showing you. There is a song in this work as well as large sections of a voice whispering – it feels very intimate. It can feel quite familiar, but as the audience, you may also feel like a co-conspirator, or at times you might also question the reliability of your narrator.
We then move from the space of Four for See Beauties into the realm of childhood. Shadow Doesis a work from 2023 that was part of a trilogy of films paying homage to grandmothers. The work is very simple and beautiful. It’s about a little girl who is writing a letter to her grandmother in the future, telling her grandmother about the state of the current world – and it’s a world that her grandmother will largely not recognise, at least from her own childhood, it has changed so rapidly over time. Some of those changes have been positive things, like equal access to education, and some of them are kind of farcical or ridiculous, things that the grandmother might laugh at. Other changes are more objectively negative. There’s mention of a warming climate, a kind of acceleration, a sense that we are taking on technical advancements without really knowing the impact of what we are doing. And that’s reinforced by the girl herself, she’s very young. She sometimes stumbles on words. She mispronounces words. You get a sense that some of the concepts that she’s describing aren’t things that she totally comprehends.In terms of filmmaking, it’s very simple, it employs the device of a shadow play and a repeated refrain of the girl saying, “Grandma, did you know…” and recounting again and again some fact about something that she has observed in life. The work is essentially about language, and its lack of visuals also allows you to imagine what she is describing in your own mind. At the end of the work, it becomes more abstract, there’s a crazy disco scene. There’s some DMX lighting. There’s also a rapid montage of images of things like octopi and flowers, again images of the body, the natural world, which are all subjects that Laure examines time and time again in her work. We head from there into La forêt, the forest, where some of those montages take physical form. La forêt is basically a journey. We invite the audience to get lost in in a forest of suspended mobiles. These mobiles were made in workshops in Melbourne and in Perth with school-age students and also with arts workers. They combine man-made elements and detritus with objects from the natural world to collaborate in new ways and create new meaning. Often in Laure’s film work, you’ll seeing a proliferation of images, and they might be scenes from the natural world, they also might be more man-made objects, and La foret gives these a physical form. As the audience, you want to create connections between things that don’t necessarily exist, or to derive your own meaning from the work. It’s also a bit of a nod to ecofeminism; Laure has increasingly developed a strong interest in the environment and particularly making works around climate change. She’s always been very interested in the natural world more broadly, and I think particularly for its allusions to being wild and free and unencumbered, as well as for the possibility that, one day, the natural world might also reclaim the man-made environment that has suppressed it. This leads us towards the final work in the exhibition, which is Every Sunday, Grand Ma. When we were conceiving the show Laure really wanted the experience of the exhibition to lead from a dark tight space of the womb, towards a bright, expansive space of the sky. If Laure were here and you asked her, “what inspired you make this work?” She might say, “Because Grandma wanted to jump out of the plane and she asked me to film her.” She’s very unforthcoming about the reasons behind her work. Laure has had a long-standing interest in birds and fish – they are symbolic of freedom and being unrestrained. In this work Grandma goes up in a plane every Sunday. She jumps out of the plane, becomes a bird, communes with nature, where she’s naked and weightless and totally free. Don’t forget, Grandpa is still in the tunnel. So now Grandma is unburdened by all of life’s weight and pressure, she’s come to terms with ageing, she’s fulfilled her life cycle and she’s very happy about it. It’s quite a joyful work.
You also notice within that work that there’s a chorus that repeats. And that is a song or composition that Laure wrote together with a musician in Ghent called Tsar B, and they’ve worked with a choir of children who come from an area called Molenbeek in Brussels, which is where Laure also lives. Molenbeek is largely a very working-class area. A lot of new migrants live and work there and Laure has ingrained herself within this community. So she’s working quite often with this choir of children for public performances and other things. But here they feature in this work and some of the lyrics that they’re singing are saying things like: “together we migrate / in our own time / to get her / together”. So there’s this sense of togetherness in their voices and this refrain that counters some of the more singular depictions of Grandma, and that collective togetherness also returns us to the realm of childhood. So returning us again to the beginning of the life cycle, and to the ‘Oui / We’ of the exhibition title.
Before we get to questions about the show, I also just wanted to mention this artist book that we made as part of Laure’s show at ACCA, H Oma J. ‘Oma’ of course, being a German word for grandmother, ‘homage’ is French for paying respect to. We commissioned close to 100 artists, curators, writers, family and friends to write short reflections or share photographs of their grandmothers. They might be their real relations – I wrote about my grandma-in-law, for example – or they might be symbolic grandmothers or cultural references that have been formative influences along the way. So to end I’m just going to read a tiny extract from Laure’s contribution to this book, in part because it also has a quite nice Western Australian reference in there as well that is particularly pertinent today, being International Women’s Day and also an election day.
Yoko filmed bottoms as Peaches,
All power to the people was Angela’s dream.
Marie was working on radioactivity.
People will never forget how you made them feel, Maya said.
Katharine got scandals out, to reach all.
Florence improved hospital conditions.
Junko climbed the highest peak of every continent.
Nina made me cry.
Rosa stood up for equal rights for all.
Annie kept her beard and was proud of it.
Josephine was everywhere, in and out of images.
Those who do not move do not feel their chains, said Rosa.
Coco dresses us.
Virginia expressed feelings we did not know could be expressed.
Edith asked for equal rights as men.
Image: Laure Prouvost, Every Sunday, Grand Ma 2022, installation view, Oui Move in You, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2025. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels; carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Madrid; and Lisson Gallery, London, New York and Shanghai. Photographer: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Laure Prouvost, Four for see beauties 2022, installation view, Oui Move in You, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2025. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels; carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Madrid; and Lisson Gallery, London, New York and Shanghai. Photographer: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Laure Prouvost, Four for see beauties 2022, installation view, Oui Move in You, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2025. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels; carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Madrid; and Lisson Gallery, London, New York and Shanghai. Photographer: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Laure Prouvost, Shadows does 2023 (detail), installation view, Oui Move in You, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2025. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels; carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Madrid; and Lisson Gallery, London, New York and Shanghai. Photographer: Rebecca Mansell. Image Laure Prouvost Opening Night, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 2025. Photographer: Tristan McKenzie.
