Julien Creuzet has reimagined his French Pavilion exhibition from the 60th Venice Biennale for The Bell / Brown Arts Institute. Merging immersive video and archipelagic sculptural installation, Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon (2024) extends the artist’s focus on water as a site of both historical and contemporary traumas and emancipatory futures. A liquid ecosystem of voice, texture, sound, and moving image as divine presence, this multisensorial project is deeply sonic, drawing from hip-hop, jazz, and other musical forms and bodily gestures across the African diaspora. Creuzet’s practice has long referenced legacies of colonialism, and his challenge to the architecture and history of the French Pavilion extends to Brown University’s campus and the centrality of Providence, Rhode Island, within the Black Atlantic.
At Brown, Creuzet expands his sculptural practice while introducing new forms of environmental affect. Six massive steel floor sculptures commissioned for The Bell are installed across the List Lobby and into the gallery, with mercurial amalgams of tropical foliage and animals silhouetted and superimposed onto islands of layered meaning and metaphor. Shimmering under the light of four large projection screens, these metal objects create an aquatic visual presence.
The translinguistic soundscape of Attila cataract (…) is a dirge to those who have experienced death in the Black Atlantic, both forced upon by others and through forms of self-emancipation. Six songs feature lyrics written by Creuzet — predominantly in creolized French with real-time translation in Portuguese, English, and Spanish available on a large flatscreen — with the aim of reflecting the migratory and cultural entanglement of the Caribbean in defiance of colonial borders and nation-states. Overflowing at and beyond the gallery space, the songs were composed to accompany a four-channel video installation, forming the project’s core conceptual elements as it travels beyond Venice.
In development since 2020, Attila cataract (…) began as an exhibition co-commissioned by The Bell and Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble and its director, Céline Kopp. The announcement that Creuzet would represent France in the 60th Venice Biennale evolved the project, with Kopp and curator Cindy Sissokho organizing a prelude survey of Crezuet’s work in the fall of 2023 at Le Magasin, titled Oh téléphone, oracle noir (…), followed by Kopp and Sissokho’s curation of the Venice Pavilion in 2024.
Attila cataract (…) is on view at The Bell through June 1.
To learn more, visit bell.brown.edu.
