Marie Ségolène Brault (b 1988 Montreal, Qc) holds a BA in Creative Writing and a BFA in Intermedia Cyberarts from Concordia University (Canada). She is currently completing her MFA in Performance at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.
Marie has exhibited work in the US, Canada and Europe. In 2018, she took part in Conversations on Contemporary Poetics at Hauser & Wirth in New York City, and has performed as part of the Performance and Noise Biennial: Tempting Failure in London (UK) Her fifth artist publication entitled Dehiscence (2018) has recently been published by Anteism.
My practice is exhibitionist: it is a combination of staged failures, confessions,
and humiliation. In a corner I peel an apple, while a recorded voice screams “BABY IS IN THE CORNER”. I fail at sinuously carving one continuous strip of skin, un-ruptured. I hone the fracture.
I am obsessed with the ways my traumas have come to define my desires. I write letters on resilience, on devotion and faith. Yes, I press my finger in my wounds but also the wounds of my mother, and her mother, and so on. I am trying to put my finger on their resilience, by looking at the gap from which it germinates– to make from the plenitude of the opening.
Through sculptural installation, I emphasize tensions between the sterile and the organic, the pristine and the sullied, the intimate and the public. I displace elements of space and time, combining a precise collection of found object to personal ones.
Through performance, I confront the audience with my queer female desire: one that is abject and personal, torturous and real. I explore dynamics of power, playing with tropes of art history and theatrically reading poetry and epistolary writing in cathartic release.
I am convinced that it is through a practice of intentional self-abandon, radical tenderness, and vulnerability that we can address collective traumas, and achieve healing.
