Biography
French-Algerian artist, born in 1971 in Nantes (France) from a Kabylian mother and a French father, Carole Douillard is graduated from the School of Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France, in 1997 (Master of Fine Arts) and from University of Language, Human and Social Sciences, Besançon, France (DU in Art, dance and performance) in 2012. In 2021-2022, she was part of international research group Of Public Interest, at the Royal Institute of Arts, Stockholm (Sweden). She’s regularly working with the « Laboratory of Gesture », ran by the pragmatist philosopher Barbara Formis at Paris 1 – University Panthéon Sorbonne.
Artist and performer, 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 contemplated object and the person contemplating it. Her work is often completed with documents, films, writings and photographs. For some years now, she has been particularly interested in the question of archives, of the conservation, in time and space, of memory and gestures.
Her recent works have been performed at Institut Giacometti, Paris (Fr) within Douglas Gordon’s exhibition The Morning After, 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, T2G, théâtre de Gennevilliers, Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, (Paris/Fr), Dance Museum (Rennes/Fr), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid, Spain)…
Since 2019 she drives 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 & San Francisco) revolves around the archives of the writer Susan Sontag and around the history of feminist gesture and performance in Southern California from the 1960s to the present day (archives partly preserved at Getty Museum, LA).
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 Exaggerated 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 Musée Carré d’Arts de Nîmes (France) and Kadist (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.
Alive, her first monograph was published in march 2016, its authors are Chantal Pontbriand, Janig Bégoc and David Zerbib (Ed. by Christian Alandete/Cabin agency – Les Presses du Réel, FR).
She regularly teaches performance art in European and north Africa art and architecture schools and universities.