Biography

Artist and performer, searcher, Carole Douillard uses her presence or that of the interpreters as sculpture for minimal interventions in space. Situated on the edge of the spectacular, while taking care to avoid it, her work calls for a redefinition of the spectator, the space of performance and the power struggle between the performers and the audience. Her work is often completed with documents, films, writings and photographs. For some years now, she has been particularly interested in the question of feminist archives, of the conservation, in time and space, of art memory and gestures. Her recent works have been performed at Le Grand Café (Saint-Nazaire, France), at Le MacVal (Vitry, France), at Dance First Think Later (Les Communs), in Geneva (Switzerland), at Institut Giacometti, Paris (France) within Douglas Gordon’s exhibition The Morning After, in Oslo (Norway), as part of Oslo Kommunes Collection, at LACE, Los Angeles & Kadist San Francisco (USA), at CCAM in Las Palmas (Canaria, Spain), at the Oslo Biennale (2019-2021), in Brussels (A performance Affair, 2018 & Wiels, 2016), at the Biennale de Lyon (Mondes Flottants, 2017), Michel Rein gallery, Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, (Paris/France), Dance Museum (Rennes/Fr), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid, Spain)… Since 2019 she conducts a research in California (Research grant « Sur Mesure », French Institute/Flax Foundation & Aide à la Création, DRAC Pays de la Loire) where she lived for several months in 2019 and in 2022. The residency (Los Angeles) revolves around phenomenology in the archives of twentieth-century writer and essayist Susan Sontag and around the history of feminist gesture and performance in Southern California from the 1960s to the present days. In 2018, she realised a performance film, Idir, with the american filmmaker Babette Mangolte which consists on a politic and poetic reenactment in Algiers’s street of an historic Bruce Nauman’s performance from 1967 (Walking in an Exaggerate Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square). Idir has been shown in 2019-2020 at the Musée d’arts of Nantes (France) and at LACE (Los Angeles). It is now part of the collection of the Musée Carré d’Arts de Nîmes (France) and Kadist Foundation (Paris & San Francisco). A first copy of her important performance The viewers was acquired in 2014 by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (France) the second one is part of Oslo City Collection (Norway). Many of her performance’s protocols are part of french public institutions’s collections. She’s also part of several research groups in Body and spaces in Europe, such as the Laboratory of gestures, La Sorbonne, Paris and Economie solidaire de l’Art, a think tank on contemporary art economy (France). In 2022, she was part of Of Public Interest, at the Royal Institute of Arts, Stockholm (Sweden). She regularely teaches performance art, as for instance at Ecole Supérieure d’Arts de Lyon (France) and in European and north Africa art and architecture schools and universities.