Camille Henrot: The Pale Fox

Bétonsalon Center for art and research is showing the first large-scale solo exhibition by French, New York-based artist, Camille Henrot in Paris.

The Pale Fox is an immersive environment building on Henrot‘s previous project Grosse Fatigue (2013) – a film awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennial. While Grosse Fatigue attempted to tell the story of the universe in thirteen minutes, The Pale Fox is a meditation on our shared desire to understand the world intimately through the objects that surround us.

More than 400 photographs, sculptures, books and drawings – mostly bought on eBay or borrowed from museums, others found or produced by the artist – are displayed on a series of shelves designed by Camille Henrot in the environment conceived for the exhibition.

The Pale Fox is a character from Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen’s eponymous book. Published in 1965, this anthropological study of the West African Dogon people profoundly affected the Western perception of African culture, by presenting a complex ancestral cosmogony encompassing elements from physics, astrophysics, agriculture, molecular biology, as well as mathematics and metaphysics. In this myth of origins, the god Ogo, the Pale Fox, embodies an inexhaustible, impatient, yet creative force.

Extending from Camille Henrot‘s collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, where she held an Artist Research Fellowship during the preparation of Grosse Fatigue in 2012, The Pale Fox has been nurtured by a fruitful collaboration with the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris.