The New York-based French artist Camille Henrot has brought her exhaustive research process to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she is staging the third carte blanche exhibition, filling the 13,000 sq. m space (after Philippe Parreno in 2013 and Tino Sehgal last year). Days Are Dogs, which opens today (18 October-7 January 2018), includes sculpture, drawings, films, installations and ikebana flower arrangements, as well as works by six guest artists. Henrot spoke to The Art Newspaper about her exhibition:
Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Photo: Joakim
One of the most exciting, if challenging, opportunities about this [Paris exhibition] has been the ability to bring many different works and installations, shown separately over the past several years, into one larger narrative. The title of the exhibition is Days Are Dogs, and the exhibition itself is governed by the days of the week—one moves through Monday, then Tuesday, etc. The days of the week are so banal and generic, and yet by closely examining them, what begins to emerge is how each day offers a picture into how the deeply personal and intimate comes into a confrontation with societal pressures and demands. Each day offers its own themes: Wednesday, for instance, is the day of Mercury (and communication). Accordingly, Wednesday in the Palais de Tokyo includes my installation Office of Unreplied Emails, which responds to an assault of spam solicitations with replies that are at once empathetic and ironic. I also invited [artists to participate, including] Nancy Lupo and Samara Scott, whom I had not previously worked with, but I had been following their work and thought both of their practices could complement the exhibition’s investigations into societal dependencies.