‘Between playfulness and intellectual depth’: artist Camille Provost brings her joyful, interactive art to Paris – The Art Newspaper

Camille Provost is putting the finishing touches to her upcoming exhibition in Paris when we meet at a canalside café near her Hackney studio. The show, which opens during Art Basel Paris, is her second and promises to be a hands-on affair. Provost is inviting visitors to interact with her work, rearranging puzzle-like sculptures in wood and ceramic. Called Le Masque et Le Vertige (Swear That You’ll Play), it takes place from 22 October-20 December at Acne Paper’s exhibition space in the Palais Royal, which opened in 2025 as a cultural initiative of the Swedish fashion house Acne Studios.

Provost was born in Côte d’Ivoire in 2000, a country devastated by civil war in 2002 and 2011. As a result, she has lived in Guinea, Brittany, Nairobi, and later Mali, where more unrest led the family to spend a year in Senegal. Finally able to return to Côte d’Ivoire in time for Provost to finish high school, in 2019, she moved to France to study archaeology and art history at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Now, through her art practice, she is beginning to reconcile the constant change of her childhood. “I didn’t have a lot of information about my past, and I guess I’ve never really asked many questions,” she says. “But when it came to making art, they came up very naturally. I wanted to understand my past and how my family ended up where they are.”

Provost began to take an interest in the West African philosophy of existence and reality that takes a non-linear approach to time, which alleviated the need to plot a definite line through her life. It emerges in her work as open-ended pieces, like unfinished puzzles, while her choice of materials speaks of a domestic world, remnants of a home that was frequently fractured. “I’m not so interested in the veracity of the past, or of memory in general,” she says. “It’s more about how I can show myself that in the present I can have an impact on the past and change the past.”

While studying in Paris, Provost often visited her late grandfather, a mechanic, in Brittany. Hanging out in his workshop, she began making work of her own. “That was my first introduction to sculpture,” she says. “Then Covid happened, and I thought, ‘if I want to do something different, it’s now or never’. So, I applied to the Royal College of Art (RCA).” Though she had no training in applied or fine art, she was accepted and moved to London in 2023. “[The RCA is] interested in what your ideas are before they become a practice and how this informs the things that you want to do once you get into college,” she says.

Creating a ‘future archaeology’

Provost had her first exhibition in January this year, following a residency at Project Loop in Hoxton, a cultural hub that focuses on decolonising and diasporic narratives. Her seven sculptural works recalled the textures and materials of the domestic world: woven rush-fibre, ceramic and wood, all carved and reassembled into enigmatic objects. She calls this “future archaeology”, using her practice to investigate how migration shapes the individual.

When Charlene Prempeh, the founder of the creative agency A Vibe Called Tech, saw the show, she contacted Acne Paper’s creative director Thomas Persson. They agreed that Provost would be an ideal collaborator for Acne Paper’s Paris space, which has previously hosted artists including ceramist Peter Schlesinger and fashion photographer Jordan Hemingway. “Camille creates a fine balance between playfulness and intellectual depth,” Prempeh says. “The complexities of her ideas and the scope of research she undertakes are handled lightly, and she gives the audience space to engage with the materiality of her pieces and offers them the almost meditative (and unusual) experience of play as an adult.”

In Paris, Provost will present visitors with a friendly challenge to step into her world. “I’m interested in having a practice that is accessible and joyful,” she says. “I know it’s very simple, but I think joy in art is really important and I want my own art to be a reflection of that.”