Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost invites us to experience her aquatic French Pavilion installation Deep See Blue Surrounding You at the 58th Venice Biennale. Crafted in collaboration with the show’s curator Martha Kirszenbaum, the Pavilion is an aqueous subterranean habitat where visitors are challenged on their notions of identity. “Prouvost's work is about representation and what it means to be a citizen of a nation, especially when your identity is not so clear cut,” says director and long-time Nowness contributor Joseph Delaney.

Prouvost’s exhibition is inspired by the decentralized nervous system of an octopus. Glass sculptures, sound works, dance, performance and lighting extends through the pavilion in a tentacular fashion. A cross-generational collection of international performers—which includes a magician, singer, rapper and karate practitioner—form part of a fictional film based on a road trip from Grigny, a suburb of Paris, to Venice. Prouvost describes the film at the heart of the installation as “the head of the octopus,” as the performers lead the audience to the exhibition space through the canals of the sinking Italian city.

“What I connected with the most was the characters Laure enlisted for her journey,” says Delaney. “It felt like we were being invited into their world. We became voyeurs watching the performers engage with the exhibition.” 

As the third ever woman to represent France in the Biennale, Prouvost seizes the viewer’s attention by her use of wordplay and jocular political commentary. Continuing in the same tradition, the artist opened her Venice show by digging a tunnel from the basement of the French Pavilion to the neighboring British space as a comic display of European solidarity.

Deep See Blue Surrounding You is on show at the Venice Biennale until 24 November 2019