Contemporânea

Laure Prouvost is a well-known French artist who rose to prominence after winning the Turner Prize in 2013 and representing France at the Venice Biennale in 2019, which further established her distinctive kind of artistic Esperanto in the international art scene. In just over a decade, her work has seduced international institutions through polyphonic immersive installations that draw from collaborative practices, video, sculpture, sound, and performance. This allure has proved irresistible to the city of Marseille, where she is currently showing in three major venues—a feat that, given the city’s relatively modest institutional landscape, renders her temporarily inescapable.

Far from the city centre, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) is screening They Parlaient Idéale (2019), the film at the heart of Prouvost’s Venice Biennale installation. This eccentric road movie follows a troupe of colourful, and vaguely anarchic, characters who travel from a Parisian banlieue to the French Pavilion in Venice. On their way, they are meandering through idiosyncratic locales such as the Palais Idéal, constructed over 33 years by the Facteur Cheval—a postman with a dream—and the Calanques of Marseille—those jagged pale rocks where nature herself seems to have been sculpting with drama. With references to Agnès Varda and octopuses, the film is also sprinkled with some flashing horror visuals, such as ocular globes—and other fragile and moist membranes—getting too close to sharp objects. Handheld footage and mobile-phone aesthetics collapse together, layered by singing, lots of whispering voice-overs, and linguistic detours. The narratives leap from tongue to tongue, French, English, Arabic, Italian, where speech and subtitle do not necessarily align but form intriguing visual and sonic non sequiturs. Prouvost succeeds in perfecting the codes of the amateur and the artlessness to such a studied extent that one begins to suspect that there is a method behind the madness.

If the Venice film foregrounds movement and nonconformist polyglot journeying via Marseille, another successful intervention speaks directly to the city, albeit in a more static fashion. Atop the Roi René tower at Mucem’s Fort Saint-Jean, the artist installed a giant copper wind-vane sculpture. Titled Icarus, Us, Elle (2024-2025), it features a six-armed, vaguely therianthropic aquatic female figure, caught in a falling crescent posture. There’s a faint avian quality to her, matching the reference to the myth of Icarus that was one of the artist’s points of departure. The naïve figure resonates poetically with its setting: the sea stretching into the horizon, the height of the tower at the end of the Vieux Port, the contrasting strength of the military architecture.

Inside the Mucem, three additional sites host works by the Brussels-based artist, who is nevertheless enamoured with Marseille’s luminous coastline as well as its rough edges. Together, these installations form Au fort, les âmes sont, a kind of gentle dérive through the historical complex. In the Salle d’exposition on Place du Dépôt, unfolds Sous les Flots les Âmes Sont, an immersive installation of sound, water-like projections on the grounds, and film. Shot underwater near the Frioul islands, the work presents a slow, aquatic drift through veiled figures, fin-like fabrics, and ritualistic gestures. The atmosphere is blue and dreamy, and invites a state of lucid reverie. Beanbags are helpfully provided to encourage surrender, while suspended metal seats add a more sculptural—if less ergonomic—touch.

Human forms float through the frame—swathed in bright and flimsy garments that echo the iridescence of tropical fish—occasionally brushing against the pale seabed. Their movements hint at rituals, in a choreographed and ornamental fashion. Some shots of Calanques—similar to those used in They Parlaient Idéale (or perhaps borrowed from?)—offer a moment of surface relief and self-reference. Non-humans also abound, veering towards the aesthetics of a stylish nature documentary: beautiful by themselves. Nonetheless, the loveliness of the images, especially the floating dances, grows a little dull. The soundtrack offers more punch—skilfully weaving together musical scores with subaquatic clicks and murmurs, it gives the piece a backbone and is worth mentioning.

In the Chapelle Saint-Jean, Mire le Mirage proposes a different kind of sensory encounter—one deprived of light altogether, or any clear point of entry for the viewer. A wall display perforated by various geometric openings reveals a mix of objects: some drawn from the Mucem’s archives, others gathered by the artist herself, alongside glass pieces she produced in Murano and Marseille. In front of it, a bench is provided for us to sit. Brief flashes of light intermittently illuminate the niches, resulting in a game of thwarted squinting. One wonders whether a more straightforward gesture—simply allowing the objects to be seen—might have offered deeper insight into the artist’s visual lexicon, rather than this carefully orchestrated game of hide and seek, as if the installation mistrusted its own content.

Nearby, in the vaulted casemate of Fort Saint-Jean, Prouvost presents an installation comprising plants (it does smell good in there), resin, a glass mobile, and the video Into All That Is Here (2015), part of an earlier body of work exploring themes linked to her grandfather. The film unfolds as a succession of lush, sensual imagery: brightly coloured floral forms, pistils, parted lips, made-up eyes—each laced with innuendo. Text appears on screen, reinforcing the erotic undertones: “We are made of moist liquid” / “We want you to get wet.” Toward the end, the mood darkens. Flames flare. A caption reads: “The images are getting hotter.” Then, in a sudden shift, disturbing real-world scenes flash by almost imperceptibly: a young woman weeping over a body, a wounded child in a hospital, a hand raised in a car as if in defence. The speed of these insertions is disorienting and verges on the subliminal—so fast we question whether we truly saw what we think we saw.

The work borrows the language of seduction and ornament only to pivot, almost slyly, toward crisis in some faraway countries—an effect that disturbs more than it clarifies either series of narratives. While this strategy echoes Prouvost’s broader engagement with sensory excess and her warnings about the risks of overconsumption, here it feels dangerously close to an easy trick, a formulaic manoeuvre. The result is ambivalent. Rather than opening a new perceptual and emotional space or deepening our engagement with life, as it appears to claim, the gesture ultimately undermines the very joy and porousness the artist so often encourages us to cultivate, while exploiting imagery from conflict zones.

Close to the Mucem, in the historical Panier neighbourhood, at La Vieille Charité—Marseille’s Baroque former almshouse turned cultural landmark—Prouvost’s Mère We Sea (2024-2025) occupies the heart of the central chapel. Suspended beneath the dome, a large pink sculpture resembling a teardrop or lactating breast hovers above a reflective pool. Ceramic fish orbit the central form, “swimming” through the air, while the floor below shimmers with watery textures and plasticine marine motifs, forming a theatrically surrealist tableau.

Sound is layered delicately into the space: from standing black speakers placed along the perimeter, fragments of recorded testimonies—collected from local residents by students and edited by the artist—recall memories of exile, childhood, and former lives once housed in the building itself (or so the leaflets suggest). The breast is lit from within by a pulsating glow and surrounded by whispers and song. The chapel’s domed architecture offers generous resonance, lending solemnity and scale to an installation that evokes a maternal sea-cosmos—soft, protective, vaguely mythic. Here we find again a constellation of symbols dear to the artist: breast, water, fish, flow. In French, mer and mère are homophones, a pun the work leans on quite literally. As a metaphor, it’s coherent: the sea as mother, the breast as sea, both as origin and care. But the execution leaves little ambiguity, and the experience is somewhat flattened, the giant breast stealing the show but not much more.

Laure Prouvost’s presence across multiple Marseille institutions is undeniably generous in scale—and notably, all free to see—if not always in depth. Her work is often praised for its warmth, humour, and collaborative ethos—one that includes not just people but winds, stones, and other elemental allies. That spirit is contagious. She is, by all accounts, a charismatic figure, known for her friendliness and for fostering collaborations across disciplines and geographies. It is perhaps this very charisma, and the joyfulness of her aesthetic, that made her an appealing figure for institutions navigating the demands of visibility and public engagement.

But here, visibility casts a long shadow. When a single artist, however well-loved, temporarily saturates a city’s already sparse institutional ecosystem, questions inevitably arise—not only about access and distribution, but also about artistic responsibility. Additionally, Prouvost draws from the glossary of the margins, the creative everyday forces of the peripheral, people on the fringes of society: women, workers, wanderers, and the elderly. Yet being a brand name, so to speak, the cumulative effect of her occupations consolidates her status and privilege rather than appears as light touches of the fantastical here and there in support of the periphery she aims to serve.

To her credit, some of the spaces she was given—vaults, chapels, towers—are far from neutral white cubes, and could benefit from being highlighted by poetic glitter. Undeniably, Prouvost worked with them inventively, there is genuine pleasure to be found in drifting through her Marseille constellation, in letting the sea-sounds wash over us, in yielding to the quiet surrealism of her world. Still, for all their surface tactility and emotional ambitions, many of the works seem content to operate within a certain comfort zone. Their gestures are often too legible, their metaphors not quite unfolding. Prouvost’s universe may be fluid and feminist, but in Marseille it also feels curiously frictionless, and ultimately highlights the precariousness of the institutional art scene—with no room for its non-institutional counterparts to speak back.

Laure Prouvost


La Vieille Charité
Mucem
Musée d'Art Contemporain [mac]