Esther Bouquet

Esther is a French artist living and working in Brooklyn. Through performance, installation, and writing (code as much as poetry), her work sheds light on the dysfunctions, power structures, and the absurdity of technologies that have profoundly transformed the way we live, work, communicate, and dream, all while questioning the human part within them.

Her projects explore the transposition of surveillance and control phenomena on the web into physical, material, and performed spaces. They reconstruct her online data traces into a catalog of targeted advertisements, archive her own browsing history, and write a bible based on the terms of service of digital services she uses. All together they bear witness to the passage of time in a strange and poetic manner while seeking to capture the immediacy of information, its evolution, accumulation, and fragility.

She has recently exhibited at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Festival DN[A] (Grenoble), and Rhizome World (NYC).

At Woodward, she will be slowing down and taking time to reflect on EMHA (Extraction and Monetization of Human Assets), a series of performances where she embodies a human data collector. She will review some of her past scripts, probably think of new ones, and analyze the 200+ forms she collected through the years.