Camille Henrot. "Grosse Fatigue." 2013. Video (color, sound), 13 min. Excerpt: 0:58 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Centur...
Camille Henrot’s extensive research across a range of disciplines like philosophy, anthropology, and history often shapes her work, including Grosse Fatigue. She made the video while in residence at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., digging into its vast collections to pull together images of objects and specimens, like animal skeletons and carved figurines, with footage she shot in offices and collection storage. Henrot merges this with additional video clips and images she both made and found online.
Characterizing her structuring of Grosse Fatigue as “an experience of density itself,” she frames this material in layered pop-up windows that continually open and close against the changing background of a computer desktop. Brief pauses in the pacing stand out in Henrot’s otherwise rapid-fire sequencing. Sometimes, a woman’s hands appear in the frames, nails playfully manicured to match the colorful backgrounds. A spoken word-style voiceover, which interweaves stories of creation from across cultures, structures the visual cacophony. Henrot describes this mash-up of scientific discovery and religious myth-making as an “intuitive unfolding of knowledge,” a presentation meant to highlight our abundance of information, as well as its limits.