Camille Henrot

Camille Henrot investigates myth and memory, knowledge and fiction, in a diverse body of work that includes films, drawings, installations, and sculptures. Her inspirations range from literary sources and film history to anthropology and religion. October 2015 Horoscope is part of an ongoing series of kinetic sculptures that look at the tendency of humans to become dependent; the complete “year” will debut as part of her solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris this fall.

October 2015 Horoscope is principally a carnival of vice—it invokes our reliance on drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol—but it also suggests how apparent virtues like bodybuilding and exercise can become addictions (other works in the series consider our obsessions with love, pets, and technology). This “horoscope” includes cartoonish sculptures of phases of the moon, which allude to the passage of time but also cycles of addiction.

The attempt to depict motion in art stretches back to cave painting in the Paleolithic era and continues into the present. Indeed, Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912—one of the most beloved works of art in the Albright-Knox’s collection—is one such attempt to represent motion in the modern city. Henrot created the illusion of motion in this sculpture using a zoetrope, a technology initially developed between the 1830s and 1860s. The artist’s use of an outmoded technology to represent contemporary vice brings an element of the funhouse to her subject, a strangely successful effect for a topic that would be difficult to discuss using more traditional narratives.

This installation is organized by Senior Curator Cathleen Chaffee.

About the Artist

Henrot’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; New Orleans Museum of Art; and Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Her work was featured in the Albright Knox’s groundbreaking exhibition Screen Play: Life in an Animated World in 2015 and group shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and SculptureCenter, New York; as well as the 2015 Lyon Biennial and the 2016 Berlin Biennial. She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the Edvard Munch Art Award in 2015.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.