Camille Henrot – Dropping the Ball (2016)

The French artist Camille Henrot (b. 1978) became instantly known throughout the international art world for her work Grosse Fatigue, which won her a Silver Lion at the 2013 Biennale di Venezia for the most promising young artist. In the video, in which she attempts to summarize the genesis of the Earth and evolution in a visually and aurally hypnotic way, historical knowledge is combined with creation myths from various religions. Computer-screen images rapidly alternate to a soundtrack of hip-hop beats and spoken word.

In other works, too, Henrot uses the aesthetic of accumulation and excess, characteristic of this digital era in which people themselves must seek connections in the flood of data. In her films, drawings, paintings, installations and sculptures, she connects the reality of the internet with aspects of her many sources of inspiration: astronomy, archaeology, cultural anthropology, religion, mythology, technology and cosmology. With this approach, she hopes to make her audience think about our knowledge systems, classification and representation that determine how we look at the world and attempt to understand it.

Henrot presented Dropping the Ball(2016) in DELIRIOUS, a mixed-metal sculpture that is located somewhere between figuration and abstraction. The work is part of a series of large bronze sculptures representing the days of the week, in this case Monday, a day that we generally associate with a degree of emotional
fragility, but also with a new beginning full of hope. A cartoonishly thick leg rests triumphantly on a football on top of a winners’ podium. Monday appears to have got off to a good start. But the other leg turns out to be broken.
Henrot's idea to make a sulpture for every day of the week emerged from the fact that a day corresponds to one revolution of the earth around its own axis, months orrespond to the position of the moon, and in one year the earth orbits around the sun. The week, on the other hand, is an entirely human invention, but even so we experienceit strongly as a cycle of building up and down, of highs and lows.