It’s a strange, strange world, Sally

The London-based French artist Laure Prouvost won the much-coveted Turner Prize last year. The award recognised a body of work that is pretty crazy and unruly – as you can see if you go along to her current exhibition at MOT International. She has transformed the gallery’s central space into a total installation that includes tapestries that serve as wallpaper, plants, video screens on stands, paintings, audio fragments, and a series of stylised dolls. The dolls are made of metal tubes with, on each head, a piece of paper on which a face has been painted. What were originally characters in the films also being screened here are, in a sense, brought to life in this way. It all adds up to a colourful whole in which Prouvost uses a variety of media in her own idiosyncratic way. The paintings she includes in this installation look like they have come from a junk market. In some cases, she has stuck objects onto them, from matches to a supermarket receipt, thereby making their already curious character appear even more surprising. Some paintings are used in a purely functional way by bending them so that they serve as the seat of a chair. Prouvost has packed the corridor at the entrance to the gallery with plants that express what they think via wee signs. One caption reads: “They did not let me grow”, while another proclaims: “I can hear my leaves falling.”

This is the kind of absurd, dry humour that has become Prouvost’s trade mark. The dazzling two-channel video installation We Know We Are Just Pixels goes a step further by attributing human characteristics to inanimate objects. At one point, the screens clash with each other (“Don’t listen to him!”); they also break the cinematic illusion by referring to the fate awaiting them once the exhibition is over (“They will put us back in boxes”). An idea as simple as it is original: after all, how many artists champion the rights of their video screens?

LAURE PROUVOST: THE MEETING > 2/8, di/ma/Tu > za/sa/Sa 10 > 18.00, MOTINTERNATIONAL, Kleine Zavel 10 place du Petit Sablon, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-511.16.52, www.motinternational.com