I Say

Camille Henrot’s work reconsiders the functions and meanings of objects and their roles within established and dominant systems of knowledge. She often draws from literature, evolutionary biology, cinema, anthropology, religion, and situations of everyday life both the banal and the transformative. The worlds created through Henrot’s work commonly present an encounter with fantasy and reality, which coalesce to consider the binary power structures of self-inflicted pain, ritual, authority, and control. The artist’s distinct visual language aim to reveal how these roles are both symbolic and reversible.

I Say is a metal sculpture composed of joined elements in bronze and aluminum. Formally, the aluminum part has a figurative shape and seems to be an anthropomorphic hybrid between an arm and a leg. It embraces, or even strangles, the bronze section, which resembles a punching bag constricted under pressure. The aluminum “arm” extends down into a hand with a pointing finger, which perhaps implies a relationship to power and judgment, since, after all, to point the finger is to embody the authority to do so. This potentially sensual embrace melds these forms together, hanging somewhere between affection and dominance. The viewers are left to speculate about the significance of an object used for martial art training being somehow subsumed by an amorphous yet distinctly human entity.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)