Laure Prouvost (b. 1978, Croix, France) is a French artist and filmmaker whose practice spans video, installation, sound, performance, and text, celebrated for its playful yet incisive engagement with language, perception, intimacy, and disorientation. Known for her immersive environments and idiosyncratic narratives, Prouvost destabilizes linear storytelling, inviting viewers into sensorial worlds where meaning slips, mutates, and reforms. Her work frequently explores themes of translation, migration, desire, feminism, and the porous boundaries between personal experience and collective imagination, often using humor and tenderness as critical tools.
Prouvost emerged to international prominence after winning the Turner Prize in 2013 for Wantee (2013), an installation that combined video, sculpture, and tea-drinking rituals to weave a fictional family history loosely connected to conceptual art lineage. Her practice is marked by an embrace of miscommunication—broken subtitles, whispered instructions, and fragmented speech—reflecting both the pleasures and failures of language in a globalized world. In 2019, she represented France at the Venice Biennale with Deep See Blue Surrounding You, an ambitious, multisensory installation that guided viewers on an underwater journey through migration routes, ecological fragility, and bodily presence, foregrounding feminist and post-national perspectives.
Across her career, Prouvost has continued to construct richly textured environments that merge the domestic with the cosmic, the absurd with the political. Her works have been exhibited internationally at institutions including Tate Britain, Palais de Tokyo, New Museum, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Centre Pompidou. Through her distinctive visual language and immersive storytelling, Prouvost challenges viewers to feel before they understand, proposing art as a space of empathy, confusion, and radical openness—one that reimagines how we relate to each other, to place, and to the shifting meanings of home.