Anouk Verviers

Building, destroying, and rebuilding cob columns as high as our bodies

Description of the exhibition

In her work, Anouk Verviers performs a cyclical process of splitting and reassembling. Moulding flesh and raw materials with her hands and mind, she reframes complicated histories through what she describes as “feminist science-fiction experiments.”

In Building, destroying, and rebuilding cob columns as high as our bodies, Verviers mixes various forms of water, impressive mounds of clay, and moving bodies to address both “women’s work,” so often made invisible or overlooked, and “women’s pain,” under-studied medically. Through shared blood and sweat, Verviers invites a group of fellow performers to tend to the performative installation for the duration of the exhibition, which is in constant movement and in need of hydration.

Further on, we hear Verviers’s roboticized voice narrating the theoretical foundations of her practice against rotating medical illustrations of an ovary with endometriosis lesions. Here, Verviers reclaims the act of cyclical labour by combining it with the politics of chronic pain, the histories of patriarchy and sexism, and the contradictions of the Anthropocene in a sci-fi-inspired pursuit of kinship.

Artist biography

Anouk Verviers

(Born in Montréal, Québec, Canada – Lives in Montréal, Québec, Canada, and London, England)

Through embodied, poetic, and collaborative processes, Verviers investigates systems of power through an intersectional feminist lens. In her interdisciplinary installations, which result from unstable, adaptable, and open procedures, she aims to reveal how we, others, and the matter around us are connected. Her work has been presented throughout Canada and in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Switzerland. She is a recipient of the Pauline-Desautels Award and a founding member of the Exhausted Feminist Hybrid Species reading group.