Aurelien Froment

Job title:

Lecturer

Role:

Director of research, School of Art

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

Office:

Main Building, Room F.01

Office hours:

Mon, 9am - 5pm; Tue, 9am - 5pm (appointment must be made in advance by email)

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

Artists moving image
Experimental cinema
Visual anthropology
Language and translation
Performance

Teaching

Aurélien is the course organiser for Art Practice 3 BA, and for Introduction to the Moving Image: Expanded History of Cinema.

Research

Examples of Aurélien's works include:

Of Shadow of Ideas (2005—2016): a series of films, sculptures and photographs embodying the Arcosanti experiment in Arizona, and revisiting the legacy of 1960’s alternative architecture.

Fröbel Fröbeled (2009–2014): an installation of objects and photographs performing Friedrich Fröbel’s practice of teaching by playing. Conceived as a travelling exhibition, the installation intertwines play and cultural history, art and pedagogy, questioning their respective forms, languages, and ideologies.

Ideal Tomb of Ferdinand Cheval (2012–2015): a large-scale installation of photographs of the Ideal Palace of Postman Cheval. The installation brings together a hundred photographs of the historical and anonymous faces, real or imagined animals, architectural details, and an exotic flora, all made from found stones and limestone throughout Cheval’s life.

Non-aligned (2016) and Allegro Largo Triste (2017) were respectively made in collaboration with passionate Bollywood amateur dancers in Dakar, Senegal, and a traditional launeddas master in Sardinia. The films transpose their performances to the screen, embodying geographical discontinuities and reflecting global cultural shifts.

Optical Theatre (2019–2023): an exhibition focusing on the work of French film still photographer Pierre Zucca (1943-1995). The exhibition shows for the first time a selection of his film-set photography (1963-1974). Informed by unexpected facets of his work (yoga instructional photographs), and his collaboration with Pierre Klossowski for The Living Currency (1970), it explores the silent theatre of still images.

Current research is developed from an ongoing examination of the work by Brooklyn born Louis Wolfson, whose autobiography was curiously written in French (Le Schizo et les langues, 1970). How is it to live as a foreigner in one’s own language? Using film, Aurélien Froment imagines ways to tell the poignant story of this ‘student in schizophrenic languages’ to an English-speaking audience.