DALLAS, Texas (August 9, 2018)—The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Sightings: Anne Le Troter, on view October 27, 2018 – February 3, 2019. In her first U.S. commission, the French artist will consider the ethics of eugenics in a linguistic score and site-specific installation.
Sightings: Anne Le Troter will be part of the Nasher Sculpture Center’s Sightings series of smaller-scale exhibitions and installations that highlight new work of emerging or established artists. Born in Saint Etienne, France in 1985, Le Troter lives and works in Paris. Her body of work explores the rhythms and physicality of language through sound: “I arrange ‘language blocks’ one after the other, reworking them, using the constraints of each phrase: duration, tone, and breathing,” she says. Le Troter’s process begins with spoken language: she collects found recordings—a telemarketer’s script or medical dictation, for example—that she then edits and reconstructs as a linguistic score, often combining a multitude of voices speaking in conversation, in unison, or discord. The artist then builds installations for her audio pieces that function as spaces to listen. These installations often include banal furniture evocative of transitional places—waiting rooms, bus stations, or office cubicles—and fall somewhere between décor and set design: “I am trying to set up environments that are as stable as possible, to let the words develop. I’m also trying to make a place for the spectator.”
For the Nasher commission, Le Troter is developing a sound piece that comprises hundreds of audio samples she collected from a U.S.-based cryobank, a facility or enterprise that collects and stores human sperm from sperm donors for use by women who need donor-provided sperm to achieve pregnancy. In the recordings, donors respond to questions on family, life, and their vision for the future, while employees provide their impressions of donors’ genetic qualities, hobbies, values, and physical traits. Altogether, the samples form portraits of prospective donors, which Le Troter distorts through the repetition of certain phrases, utterances, and pauses.
Inspired by such science fiction novels as H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Mereau (1832) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Le Troter’s sound installation will consider the ethics of eugenics and the role of language in the endless search for an absurdist ideal.
Sightings: Anne Le Troter is the artist’s first U.S. commission and will be Le Troter’s first work in the English language.
For excerpts of Le Troter’s past audio works, please follow this link: https://soundcloud.com/nneeroter
For high res images of Anne Le Troter’s previous work, please follow this link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/enxhvs9dys9w129/AAAYGT_tpzpidW66s-oGnZY2a?dl=0
About Anne Le Troter Anne Le Troter (born in 1985 in Saint Etienne, lives in Paris, France) is a graduate of HEAD, Geneva (2012), and ESAD, Saint-Etienne (2011). Her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions: FMAC, Artgenève (2018), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017), the Arnaud Deschin Gallery, Paris (2016), BF15 (Lyon, 2015), Espace Crosnier (Geneva, 2015) and Espace Quark (Geneva, 2014). She has also taken part in a large number of group shows, including “In & Out”, at La Villa du Parc, Annemasse (2016), “RUN RUN RUN”, at La Station and La Villa Arson, Nice (2016), the 60th Salon de Montrouge (2015), “The Generic Way”, Zabriskie Point, Geneva (2015), “Diversi Muri - un omaggio a N.O.F.4”, at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (2015), “Le pas funambule”, at the Galerie Piano Nobile, Geneva (2013) or else “Une exposition à être lue, Volume 2”, at LiveInYourHead, Geneva (2011). Le Troter is a nominee for the 20th Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard Prize and was awarded the Grand Prix at the 61st Salon de Montrouge (2016) and Swiss Art Awards in 2013. Le Troter is currently in residence at the Cité des Arts in Paris, where she is preparing her first piece of theater for the Contemporary Art Center, Le Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire, France.
Sightings: Anne Le Troter is supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.