Prune Phi : Otherworld Communication: Prune Phi’s first gallery solo exhibition and performance cycle in Paris

From 9 October through 15 November, the gallery transforms into the Otherworld Communication headquarters, where the artist Prune Phi will operate a  telecommunication enterprise specialised in communing with the dead.

Through performances-as-private consultations with the participant-clients, Prune Phi activates an immersive two-story installation in the gallery, where metallic sculptures by the artist will also be presented. 

To engage the services of Otherworld Communication (to participate in the performance portion of the work), the public is invited to book an appointment for a personalised consultation at Otherworld@15beautreillis.com. In each private session, Phi invites the participant to remember a loved one they have lost before writing a personal message to them. This message is then printed on a phone made of paper, becoming a text message that can be sent by burning the object.

The Marseille-born French artist Prune Phi was inspired by the tradition of burning joss paper for the dead, a custom passed down to her from her grandfather who arrived in France as part of the Vietnamese diaspora. This ritual involves the burning of funerary paper bank notes to send funds to the deceased in the afterlife. This practice has evolved with time and along with bank notes, the living are now offering miniature paper replicas of clothes, luxury items, and even smartphones.  The introduction of new technologies into this ancestral rite prompted Prune Phi  to explore the role that these elements can play in our cultural knowledge.

The artist entices her audience with humour then surprises them with the sincerity of her listening. She encourages us to reconsider the very idea of a ‘ritual’ while offering a contemporary reading of this tradition; effectively putting technology, culture, transmission and memory at the centre of her inquiry. We are suspended between the spiritual and the virtual, meeting the artist at the heart of her work in an environment as enchanting as it is perplexing. It isn’t the world of the dead or the living that the artist is interested in, but the bridge that connects them, with all their contradictions and similarities. Phi favours multiplicity by straddling these inter-worlds: a twofold vision echoing the diasporic condition, an identity imbued with pluralities where loss and translation meet discovery and wonder.

“What Prune Phi has done with Otherworld Communication is to show us ‘the marvellous real’ – beyond asking us to suspend disbelief, this work conjures a parallel reality into being in its totality. Prune Phi is one of the most exciting French artists practicing this moment, and I am excited and honored to present her work at our Paris gallery this October and November,” remarked Quinnie SG TAN, director of 15 Beautreillis.

Curator: Amandine Vabre Chau