Aurelien Froment

Job title:

Lecturer

aurelien.froment@ed.ac.uk
+44 (0)131 651 5882

Office:

Main Building, Room F.01

Office hours:

Mon, 10am - 12pm

Research Output:

Edinburgh Research Explorer link

Biography

Aurélien Froment was born in Angers (France). Before moving to Scotland in 2016, he lived in Dublin for 8 years. He studied at the Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and graduated in 2000.

Aurélien’s practice is rooted in film, playing with its structure, its language, its materials, its experience, and its spaces. His work channels histories of concrete utopias, often located at the borders of modernity. Aurélien Froment navigates their possible origins, retracing the circulation of these practices and ideas, until our present. His research takes many forms, from large-scale photographic installations (Théâtre optique, 2021; Of Shadows of Ideas, 2016; Tombeau idéal de Ferdinand Cheval, 2015; Fröbel Fröbeled, 2014), to films conceived as small theatres (Creuser Wolfson, 2023; Camillo’s Idea, 2013; Pulmo Marina, 2010; Théâtre de poche, 2007; The Apse, the Bell and the Antelope, 2005).

His work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally: Les Rencontres de la photographie (Arles, 2023), Institut pour la photographie (Lille, 2021), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2019), M Museum (Leuven, 2017), Musée des Abattoirs (Toulouse, 2016), Dakar Biennale (2016), New Museum (New York, 2016), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe, 2015), Sydney Biennale (2014), Venice Biennale (2013), Gwangju Biennale (2010).

His films have been screened at Anthology Film Archives, Cinéma du réel, Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico (Nuoro), Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, LUX, Centre Pompidou.

His work is part of the permanent collections of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, MACBA in Barcelona, Smith College Museum of Art, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, FRAC Centre, FRAC Aquitaine, FRAC Ile de France, FRAC Pays de la Loire, FRAC PACA, Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart.

Aurélien is represented by Marcelle Alix gallery in Paris.

Research interests

Film
Artists moving image
Experimental cinema

Teaching

Aurélien teaches across art and film practices.

He is currently the course organiser for Permanent Cinema (MFA Film Art) and for Introduction to the Moving Image: Expanded History of Cinema (BA).

Research

I am currently in development for a film project after, with, and within, the work of American writer Louis Wolfson. Louis Wolfson (New York, 1931 – Miami, 2024) was an American author who wrote in French. He rejected his mother tongue following psychiatric treatments in the 1950s, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. He taught himself French, German, Russian, and Hebrew to develop a sophisticated form of language transformation to overcome contact with English. Gallimard published his first book in 1970.

The material of this project are the resistance and tensions of language: how it includes and excludes, how it limits and emancipates. Louis Wolfson’s linguistic processes involve transformations, akin to a scientist, an alchemist, or an artist. It involves actions like erasing, covering, dissecting, obliterating, encoding. Systematically dissolving words, removing vowels, substituting consonants, he reforms them through a bricolage of foreign languages. Beyond the abstraction of of erasing language and transforming it, I am interested in finding what it involves physically, materially, and visually. What are the instruments, material, gestures, rituals? What space does it create? How does it connect to the outside world?

With this film, this story and these forms, I want to explore how we speak. At a time when political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable (Orwell, Politics of the English Language, 1946), when words mask realities, rewrite history, or are simply forbidden from being used, I want to explore with this film the tension between withdrawing and sharing, and its consequences. What society does it produce? What options are left when the foundations on which language is build are eroding, or transgressed?

Segments and fragments have been shown in different contexts:

• Creuser Wolfson, video installation, solo exhibition ‘Il était une fois et une fois il n’était pas’, Marcelle Alix, Paris, 2023.
• Louis and Languages, film, 22 min, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, New Cinema Award, Berwick Upon Tweed, 2024.
• Louis and Languages, film, 22 min, Cinéma du réel, international competition, 2024.
• Index of Coincidences, installation of collages, group exhibition ‘Desire is a Machine’, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2025.
• Bricolage Schizophrenique, sculpture, group exhibition ‘Desire is a Machine’, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2025.
• Journée d’étude, Traduction et thérapeutique, Laboratoire ECHELLES, Université Paris Cité
• Other screenings and exhibitions of Louis and Languages include Flights from Reason (The Model, Sligo, 2025), Cork International Film Festival (2024), Docs Ireland (2024).

With support from the Leverhulme/British Academy (Small Grant, 2024-26), and Creative Scotland Open Fund (2023, 2026).