Dying Living Woman

In Deep Inside, Camille Henrot's first film, a pornographic film is transformed into a voyeuristic, lovelorn ballad. Drawn frame by frame on the 35mm film stock of a 70s pornographic film, the sexual content is partially revealed and partially hidden by black animated forms that seem to be fugitive memories of an old love. The music is slow and harrowing like a howl for love. The artist works with marker as one might use a stencil, revealing part of the original film in the drawing's negative space. By combining pornographic and sentimental expression, the film posits that emotional misery is also physical. Sexual excitation and heartache are both based on an alternation of empty and full, presence and absence, hidden and revealed things. This manipulated film creates ambiguous images where scopophilia is no longer based on tactile frustration.

Saturday focuses on the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church, an evangelical Christian denomination with an apocalyptic expectation, that celebrates the Sabbath and practices immersion baptism rituals on Saturday. Through the figure of the SDA Church appear the themes of hope for a better life and the desire to flee the daily mundane, which here manifests in a religious mode, but takes form elsewhere in the practice of particular dietary rules and extreme sports. Shot mostly in 3D, the film combines scenes recorded at SDA Church sites in the USA, Polynesia, and the Kingdom of Tonga with images of food, surfing, and medical tests; together, they immerse us in a parallel world of hope and belief – of transparencies and opacities. Meanwhile, text scrolling at the bottom of the screen materializes both a source of information and a desire to escape from it.

Camille Henrot’s work reveales, by it’s handcraft production process using scratching on filmroll, the materiality of the filmic support, thus altered. The artist often appropriates herself existing movies to make a video in animattion drawing, unlike Lansky that was made with a blank color film made black by simple light exposure. Paying a tribute to electro-acoustic composer Paul Lansky, this video is joint together in a mathematic like shooting script of musical sequences made by Benjamin Morando and François Goujon (Octet) after the famous piece Ilde Catter (1985). To each musical sequence corresponds an animation sequence which, far from a strictly narrative linearity, could as well be alterned or loop. One thinks (s)he catches sight of a bees swarm or of crying ghosts, but they vanish to give place to the more emotionate universe of a childhood reminiscent of melancholy. Verane Pina

The members of a spaceship crew are attacked by monsters from another dimension. In Metawolf, naive "trash" drawing modifies the stereotypical science-fiction image. From trailer to music video, this Hollywood movie is infested with the artist’s drawings, which are transforming it into a mutant object.

Million Dollars Point is the name of a dive site on Santo Island, in Vanuatu, a lagoon that had become an underwater cemetery for hundreds of tanks and canons abandoned by the U.S. army after World War II. The site was named after the amount offered by the natives to buy this war material out, brand new but already outdated. The film Million Dollars Point juxtaposes the images of this submarine battlefield with footage of a local music video showing a French mustached man dancing and singing on a Pacific beach with Polynesian girls at his side.

A looped video, part of the City of Ys sculptural installation series by Camille Henrot.

Animals are central to our earliest experiences of childhood. They inhabit books, toys, nursery rhymes, and stories through which we begin to make sense of the world. Yet many of these same species are now threatened or endangered. A growing gap exists between the imaginary world we pass on to children and the one they will inherit. It is within this space that In the Veins takes shape, a film by Camille Henrot developed over the course of five years. By drawing parallels between a child's development and the growth of animals and plants, the artist explores the connections that unite all forms of life, as well as their shared vulnerability.