Screening: Camille Henrot's '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 during our looping screening of the film from Friday 1 December – Saturday 2 December.

‘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 drop-in event is free, and the film will play on a loop each day from 10 am – 6 pm.

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.