Aurélien Froment | Edinburgh College of Art

Job title: Lecturer, Photography

Office address: Main Building, Room B.57

Contact time: Mon, 4pm - 5pm; Tue, 4pm - 5pm (appointment must be made in advance by email)

Research outputs: Aurélien Froment on Edinburgh Research Explorer

Aurélien is a practicing artist, living in Edinburgh since 2016, previously based in Dublin and Paris. He studied at the Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and graduated in 2000.

Solo exhibitions in the last five years have included: Meessen de Clercq (Brussels, 2018), Marcelle Alix (Paris, 2018), M-Museum (Leuven, 2017), Les Abattoirs, Musée - FRAC Occitanie (Toulouse, 2016), Bunkier Sztuki (Krakow, 2016), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe, 2015), Heidelberger Kunstverein (Heidelberg, 2015), CAG (Vancouver, 2014), Villa Arson (Nice, 2014), Spike Island (Bristol, 2014), FRAC Ile-de-France (Paris, 2014).

Since 2000, his work has received major international attention with participation in the Dakar Biennale (2016), Sydney Biennale (2014), Venice Biennale (2013), Lyon Biennale and Yokohama Triennial (both 2011) and Gwangju Biennale (2010). Selected group shows include: New Museum (New York, 2016), IMMA (Dublin, 2016), ACCA (Melbourne, 2015), Clark House Initiative (Bombay, 2015), Witte de With (Rotterdam, 2014), Beirut (Cairo, 2014), CCA Derry (2013), Turner Contemporary (Margate, 2013), San Francisco MoMA (2012), Pinchuk Art Centre (Kiev, 2012), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, 2012), CAPC (Bordeaux, 2011), Performa (New York, 2009).

His work is part of the permanent collections of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, MACBA in Barcelona, Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton and in France at the 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 and Artothèque du Limousin.

Aurélien is a studio holder at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop since 2017 and is represented by Marcelle Alix in Paris.

Aurélien’s practice is mostly lens-based (film and photography), drawing from cultural history to explore and question our relations to images. Decentred, marginal or outsider perspectives inform his research.

Examples of his works include:

Of Shadow of Ideas (2005—2016), a series of films, sculptures and photographs embodying Paolo Soleri’s visionary project and revisiting the legacy of 1960’s alternative architecture.

Fröbel Fröbeled (2014), an installation of objects and photographs exhibiting Friedrich Fröbel’s 19th C. educational material. Conceived as a travelling exhibition, the installation creates an intersection between play and cultural history, art and pedagogy, questioning their respective forms, language, and ideology.

Ideal Tomb of Ferdinand Cheval (2015), a large-scale installation of photographs of the ‘Palais idéal du Facteur Cheval’. Celebrating vitality and individuality, the monument was built by a 19th C. countryside postman in the South of France. Exploring Cheval’s life-long work through photographic details, the installation is as much an incomplete inventory than an attempt to represent it.

His most recent films were made in Senegal (Non alignés, 2016) and Sardinia (Allegro Largo Triste, 2017), respectively with amateur dancers and a traditional musician. The films transpose their performances to the screen, embodying historical and geographical discontinuities reflecting global cultural shifts.

Current research is drawn from film set photography to expose the exploitation of stereotypes within the film industry and explore the possibility for criticality to emerge from within. Focusing on the work of French film still photographer Pierre Zucca (1943-1995), the initial research is supported by a grant from the Institut pour la photographie in Lille.

Academic staff profile Aurélien Froment

Gallery