Louise Vo Tan

Born in 1996, in Paris, France
Lives and works in Paris, France

Louise is a hybrid artist whose work oscillates between experimental video, sound, and installation. Her practice revolves around systemic transformations and their sensory resonances. At the same time, she develops sound as a space for composition in its own right, where sound becomes a vehicle for narration and emotion. Starting from visual or symbolic entities, her work questions the power that these objects exert over our behavior. Through immersive devices, she confronts physical, psychic, and social worlds that intertwine to form interconnected systems. Between technology and archaism, violence and harmony, the way these systems regulate, oppose, and sometimes cancel each other out reveals a permanent tension between creation and destruction.

“It was while filming cars at night on a motorway in Glasgow that Louise Vo Tan began to question the machine as a symbol of fantasy and power, an emblem of a reality that fascinates and oppresses. This intuitive gesture marked the beginning of a deeper quest around these icons of liberalism.

Back in France, she obtained permission to enter a scrapyard for end-of-life vehicles (ELVs), where she filmed the process of dismantling, destruction, and recovery of recyclable materials. She discovered a world hostile to humans, dominated by machines and governed by exploitation on several levels: waste shipped to Africa and Asia under the guise of “recycling,” and harmful and grueling working conditions. The investigation revealed the underside of a globalized system presented as virtuous, but which neglects social and environmental impacts.

This investigation gave rise to Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear to Tread, an audiovisual performance installation that places the audience at the center of an immersive environment, surrounded by 18 screens, where images and sounds interact in real time, controlled by microprocessors and a master computer. The haptic aesthetics of the machines contrast sharply with the destruction they inflict, confronting the viewer with a profound sense of unease. When her voice performs Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling In Love, the romantic lyrics, altered by autotune, create an ambivalent fusion: an artificial romance, sampled and recycled over and over again, between humans and machines.

Through these immersive audiovisual devices, she infiltrates the exhibition space with industrial zones, thus confronting distant social worlds that belong to the same frenetic system.”

Anne Laure Peressin