PARIS.- Galerie Nathalie Obadia announced the representation of Laura Henno. Photographer and filmmaker Laura Henno fashions a singularly plastic, resolutely political oeuvre, where each project sheds light on parallel realities, often marked by displacement or migration.
Winner of the 2019 Sam Prize for Contemporary Art, Laura Henno will have an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo next spring, from April 15 to September 4, 2022. The artist will present an ensemble 10 years in the making, which explores the geopolitics of the Comoros archipelago. Through films and photographs, Laura Henno traces the complexity of migration in this area of the Indian Ocean. She is particularly interested in the clandestine lives formed in the invisible interstices of Mayotte, since its split with the rest of the archipelago. Favoring an immersive approach within the communities she follows over the course of several years, the artist builds strong relationships with her protagonists. Thus, she narrates the destiny of Patron, a young boy trained against his will to be-come a smuggler, whom she has followed over the years and featured in her multi-awarded film Koropa. But also that of Smogi, a character we discover in her film Djo, who lives a symbiotic relationship with his pack of dogs, in total harmony with the spirits of the forest.
Selected for the Villa Albertine, Laura Henno will inaugurate the new French artist residency in the USA in 2022. This program will allow her to develop her American series Outremonde and her feature film Haven, which portray the inhabitants of a camp located in southeastern California. Slab City, a veritable no man's land, is populated by 'outcasts' abandoned by a society from which they find themselves unshackled. The artist thus paints a picture of a makeshift Americana, which she captures in the low light of the end of the day. Illuminating the uncertain destinies of forgotten populations, Laura Henno probes a geopolitics of the margin, in dialogue with the great tradition of American documentary photography.
Galerie Nathalie Obadia will dedicate a solo exhibition to Laura Henno in its Beaubourg gallery in early 2022. Prior to this event, the gallery will also show photographs from the Outremonde and M'Tsamboro series as part of the inaugural exhibition at its new outpost, 91 Faubourg Saint Honoré starting September 9, as well as at its booth at Paris Photo from November 11 to 14, 2021.
After studying photography at the ENSAV of La Cambre, Laura Henno starts a formation in cinema at the Fresnoy. Winner of the Prix Découverte des Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles in 2007, the artist has since had a plethora of exhibitions in France and abroad, such as her show Radical Devotion at the Institute for Photography in Lille 2019, at the Ryerson Image Center in Toronto, Redemption at the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles in 2018, M'Tsamboro at the BBB Centre d'Art in Toulouse in 2017, Summer Crossing at the Centre Photographique Ile de France, or her show at the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki in 2011.
Laura Henno also participates in numerous group exhibitions such as Diaspora at Home at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Nigeria, Eldorama at the Tri Postal in Lille, Persona Grata, at the Mac Val and Musée National de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, Paris, at the Sharjah Biennial, and at the Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art in Memphis, USA.
