Camille Henrot & Estelle Hoy: Jus d’Orange

In Jus d’Orange, words and images run after the themes of melancholy, failure, injustice, and hope in a unique exhibition display conceived specifically for the first floor of Fondazione ICA Milano in the shape of a kaleidoscopic installation. Back and forth, to-and-fro, text and image inspire one another—ongoing and unending—intoxicated by life’s many interferences.

The exhibition is realised by the artists in collaboration with Fondazione ICA Milano and is curated by Chiara Nuzzi. The show creates a path of mutual and continual contamination emerging from a dialogue between Camille Henrot’s images and Estelle Hoy’s texts, amalgamated through dense, examining conversation between the artists.

Jus d’Orange presents a selection of new paintings by Henrot inspired by Hoy’s texts and vice versa, the result of over five hundred images and thousands of messages that the artists, united by deep friendship, have exchanged via WhatsApp, Instagram, shared Google Docs, voice messages, and live conversations since late 2021.

The collaboration takes as its starting point Estelle Hoy’s text Venetian Waters of Jus d’Orange, inspired by the circumstance of a friend of the artist witnessing the collapse of the roof of her home after numerous sacrifices made over the years to buy it. The themes of failure and hope, represented by the cultivation of an orange grove on the ruins of the destroyed house, inspired Henrot to create a series of watercolours and paintings on canvas, including A Thrill or a Spill (2022); Cool Nights (2022); A Mountain of Oranges (2023); Fruitful Labor (2023), and constitute the starting point of an uninterrupted dialogue between the two artists. From literature they read to lived experiences, from exhibitions visited to psychoanalytic theories, from current social issues to dreams and personal aspirations, Camille Henrot and Estelle Hoy create an intimate journey.

Pivotal to the textual and visual narrations is the artists’ reflection on the humorous implications of the depicted subjects. The figures captured on Henrot’s canvases meet Hoy’s sharp and prophetic words in a game of cross-references where humor is vital and where each work dialogues with the next, opening up individual and collective readings within the space. The atmosphere of intimacy that characterises the exhibition is further accentuated by a moment of sharing, represented by the fortune cookies offered to the public that carry unconventional and prophetic messages referring to the show’s playful and irrational component.