From our friends at BOMB Magazine, today we bring you a conversation between Michael Barron and artist Camille Henrot. Discussing her recent solo show at Metro Pictures, Henrot says, “Bad Dad & Beyond is an investigation into a figure who uses his authority in violent ways. I was also interested in assembling the rules and values of various authority figures, not just for fathers.” This article was originally published on January 15, 2016.

Camille Henrot. Bad Dad & Beyond, 2015; three-dimensional resin print with video and telephone components; 44 x 20 x 9 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

At the recent opening of Camille Henrot’s solo show at Metro Pictures, I stood in a line, waiting to use a telephone. There were eight of them, all occupied by people with receivers cupped to their ears. But one in particular, stylized and colored like a Nickelodeon TV show prop, had caught my attention. Its occupant, a young woman whose bunned hair threatened to topple from her head, widened her eyes and furled her brow as she listened to the voice on the other end. Finally, she hung up and shot me a nonplussed look. “So weird…” she said. Then, as if proffering advice, she suggested, “I just pressed ‘0’ for every question. Maybe you can keep hitting ‘1’ then come find me to compare answers.” I picked up and heard a male voice who, friendly enough and definitely assertive, had me run a gamut of bizarre questions, such as, “If your dad has fathered more than nine children, press ‘0’/If your father has eaten any of his children, press ‘1’.” For a non-native English speaker like Henrot, who expatriated from Paris to New York in 2011, hotlines are a demonstration of how easily language can bewilder and command.

Being misunderstood has given Henrot an appreciation for the exotic. In her first work completed in New York, Is It Possible to Be a Revolutionary and Still Like Flowers (2012), Henrot created a series of installations inspired by Ikebana—the Japanese art of floral arrangement notorious for its opaque techniques—to explore a grand metaphor for translation and the limits of cultural understanding. Henrot’s most famous work to date,Grosse Fatigue, is a thirteen-minute multimedia narration of Google images, YouTube videos, and a spoken word voice-over that explores the diversity of creation myths and underlines one of humanity’s greatest gifts: its ability to tell stories.

Read the full article here.