Prune Nourry

This book chronicles the in-situ creation of a monumental sculpture by French American artist Prune Nourry (born 1985). Depicting a pregnant woman’s body emerging from the earth, the immersive installation is based on the principles of eco-responsible architecture.

This is the first retrospective on French-born, New York–based artist Prune Nourry (born 1985), who uses sculpture, installation, performance and video, while also collaborating with researchers and scientists, to address bioethical issues such as gender selection, artificial procreation and genetic engineering. Her critically acclaimed triptych on gender selection started in India with the projects Holy Daughters (2009) and Holy River (2011). The third part, Terracotta Daughters, a life-size army Prune made in Xi’an, China, traveled the world in 2014 before being buried in 2015 as a contemporary archaeological site. This volume surveys ten years of work, with essays by the psychoanalyst François Ansermet, Sophie Makariou, director of the Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet, the artist Orlan, Tatyana Franck, director of the Musée de l’Élysée, the artist Clifford Ross and the Indian sociologist Ravinder Kaur.