Camille Henrot, The Pale Fox

Bétonsalon – Center for art and research is pleased to announce the first large-scale solo exhibition by French, New York-based artist, Camille Henrot in Paris. The Pale Fox is an immersive environment building on Henrot’s previous project Grosse Fatigue (2013) – a film awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennial. While Grosse Fatigue attempted to tell the story of the universe in thirteen minutes, The Pale Fox is a meditation on our shared desire to understand the world intimately through the objects that surround us. As Camille Henrot explains: “The main focus of The Pale Fox is obsessive curiosity, the irrepressible desire to affect things, to achieve goals, to perform actions, and the inevitable consequences.”

More than 400 photographs, sculptures, books and drawings – mostly bought on eBay or borrowed from museums, others found or produced by the artist, are displayed on a series of shelves designed by Camille Henrot in the environment conceived for the exhibition. They populate a space that is both physical and mental, conveying an almost domestic atmosphere: it could be a bedroom, a room that one could inhabit. Each of the four walls of this space is associated with a natural element, a cardinal point, a stage of life and one of Leibniz’s philosophical principles. Opening with “the principle of being” (where everything starts: birth and childhood), the installation progresses with “the law of continuity” (where everything develops: growth and teenage-hood) before touching on “the principle of sufficient reason” (where limitations arise: adulthood) and concluding with the “principle of the identity of the indiscernibles” (where things decline and disappear: old age).

According to Camille Henrot, there is “an excess of principles” in The Pale Fox. Through this pathological and almost erotic “cataloguing psychosis,” the potential for disorder returns. There is no harmony without disharmony, and no knowledge without accumulation or deception. This relationship is reflected in an ambient soundtrack which is interrupted by coughing fits, composed by musician Joakim, that is both protective and timeless. The Pale Fox proposes a narrative frieze, a dynamic parable of the failure inherent in any attempt of addressing globality. “With The Pale Fox, I intended to mock the act of building a coherent environment. Despite all of our efforts and good will, we always end up with a pebble stuck inside one shoe.”

The Pale Fox, is a character from Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen’s eponymous book. Published in 1965, this anthropological study of the West African Dogon people profoundly affected the Western perception of African culture, by presenting a complex ancestral cosmogony encompassing elements from physics, astrophysics, agriculture, molecular biology, as well as mathematics and metaphysics. In this myth of origins, the god Ogo, the Pale Fox, embodies an inexhaustible, impatient, yet creative force. “This is what I’m drawn to in the figure of the fox: it is neither bad, nor good, it disturbs and alters a seemingly perfect and balanced plan. In that sense, the fox is an antidote to the system, acting on it from inside.” A meditation on order and disorder, The Pale Fox addresses the tragic side of the human species in its most basic dimension, the aspect that emerges, according to Bataille, at the moment of cutting one’s nails or putting on socks. Staging an impossible and fetishistic attempt of ordering thoughts and objects, the exhibition nevertheless offers its enclosed universe to the freeing potential of an insatiable fox.

Extending from Camille Henrot’s collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, where she held an Artist Research Fellowship during the preparation of Grosse Fatigue in 2012, The Pale Fox has been nurtured by a fruitful collaboration with the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris. A series of public conversations between artists, curators and scientists will take place between Bétonsalon – Center for art and research and the Museum throughout the fall; ; it will launch with a talk between Camille Henrot and anthropologist Monique Jeudy-Ballini on September 24 at 7pm. An artist book co-published by Bétonsalon – Center for art and research is forthcoming in 2015.

Camille Henrot, "The Pale Fox", exhi­bi­tion view at Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2014. Picture © Aurélien Mole.

About Camille Henrot
Camille Henrot (b. 1978) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the New Museum, New York (2014); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2014); New Orleans Museum of Art (2013); Slought Foundation, Philadelphia (2013); kamel mennour, Paris (2012) and Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris (2010). Group exhibitions include Companionable Silences, Nouvelle Vague, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013) and A Disagreeable Object, SculptureCenter, New York (2012). Henrot received the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013 and she is shortlised for the Hugo Boss Prize 2014. She is co-curating the forthcoming group exhibition Puddle, Pothole, Portal at the SculptureCenter in New York with Ruba Katrib, opening in October 2014.

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The Pale Fox is commissioned and produced by Bétonsalon – Center for art and research, Chisenhale Gallery (London), Kunsthall Charlottenborg (Copenhagen) and by Westfälischer Kunstverein (Münster) where it will tour in 2015. At Bétonsalon – Center for art and research, The Pale Fox is supported by a partnership with the French Museum of Natural History, thanks to two grants from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication SG / SCPCI / DREST as part of the call for research projects “Intercultural practices in the heritage institutions”, and from the Curating Contemporary Art Programme of the Royal College of Art in the frame of the MeLa* European Museums in an age of migrations Research Project. With the support of Saint Maclou & Leroy Merlin & iGuzzini.
With thanks to kamel mennour,Paris, Johann König, Berlin, and Metro Pictures, New York.