Grosse Fatigue

Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by some man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.

— Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert (1832)

Camille Henrot won the Silver Lion for best young promising artist at this year's Venice Biennial for her heady "encyclopedic" video Grosse Fatigue, which perfectly encapsulates our anxious, knowledge-thirsty contemporary moment. Windows upon windows open on a computer screen, like a succession of Russian dolls, revealing a dizzying array of taxonomic information. Slam poetry-style narration, written in collaboration with poet Jacob Bromberg and percussively scored by acclaimed DJ Joakim Bouaziz, describes an increasingly breathless excursion through the history of the universe. "In the beginning there was...."

An exceedingly prolific, multi-disciplinary artist, whose work ranges from sculpture and drawing to film and video, Henrot demonstrates a fervent fascination with the collection and circulation of objects, as well as symbols of the past and their estranged, present-day applications. Grosse Fatigue emerged from the artist's fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, where she dove into creationist myths from a vast array of cultures, exhuming artifacts and their legends. The video paradoxically partakes in the desire for totalizing cosmological knowledge and in the state of saturation, indeed exhaustion, that results from that subjective quest — one that, of course, extends to art-making itself and its interpretations. An addictive mix of beats and anthropology, Grosse Fatigue is video art as exhilarating nervous breakdown.

ANDRÉA PICARD Presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West. Runs daily, September 5-15.