International Project Space
29 September - 10 December 2011
Opening Wednesday 28 September, 5-7pm

Comprising six narrative sequences, The Wanderer is based on script by artist Rory Macbeth who, without any knowledge of German, translated a Franz Kafka novella into English. The film follows a number of characters who undergo a series of increasingly bizarre and mysterious experiences, navigating various situations in which reality becomes an increasingly uncertain concept.

Working for the first time with a full crew and a cast of actors, Prouvost used Macbeth’s text as a loose framework rather than a definitive script, opening up the narrative to the various shifts and slippages of language and direction introduced by filmmaking process. Where the first sequence of The Wanderer focuses on the notion of time, this second sequence focuses on the character Betty who, in a state of intoxication, delivers a rambling monologue directed alternately at peripheral characters within the film and us, the audience.

Prouvost’s work is characterised by her subversion of the narrative tropes of filmmaking. Drawing viewers into seemingly personal stories, heightened by Prouvost’s use of handheld cameras and whispered voiceovers, their truth status is quickly undermined by surrealist interjections of image and text which insistently challenge our ability to piece together all of these narrative elements.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of events exploring Prouvost’s work as well as a newly commissioned essay by Fionn Meade (Curator, Sculpture Centre, New York).