Julien Creuzet will represent France at the Venice Biennale 2024

Julien Creuzet (36) lives and works in Paris. The French-Caribbean visual artist and poet actively intertwines these two practices via amalgams of sculpture, installation and textual intervention that frequently address his own diasporic experience. Inspired by the poetic and philosophical reflections of Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant on creolization and migration, Creuzet’s work focuses on the troubled intersection of the history of Martinique and the events of European modernity.

The selection committee, which includes the director of the Center Pompidou-Metz Chiara Parisi, the director of the HKW in Berlin Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Katerina Gregos, artistic director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art EMST in Athens, praised Creuzet’s multidisciplinary approach. The committee unanimously chose Julien Creuzet:

“In his work, poetry infuses with strength and generosity a plurality of practices: sculpture, text, video, music, performance, and new technologies. These different elements compose immersive and multi-sensory worlds animated by whispered memories. His singular practice and his talent for oral literature are guided by creolization and bring together a diversity of materials, stories, shapes and gestures. The questions raised by his work will find at the French Pavilion in Venice a particularly important resonance with those of our time.”

The artist will propose a totally new project for the French Pavilion. It will be supported by the Institut français, which will operate the pavilion on behalf of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the French Ministry of Culture.

Creuzet has had solo exhibitions and also participated in numerous institutional group exhibitions including at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (2022-2023), Musée Tinguely, Basel (2022), The National Gallery of Prague (2022), LUMA, Arles (2022), the Camden Art Centre (2022), Centre Pompidou
(2021).