Emmanuelle Lainé work transforms exhibition spaces into immersive environments. Life-sized photographs, installations and anamorphic illusions distort, multiply and stratify her sites, rendering them labyrinthine: viewpoints multiply as new pathways are opened up. We enter the works as if stepping into another dimension, where the visual clamour, the delirious symmetries and the appearance of outsized objects make it easy to lose our bearings. These site-specific compositions, real-life trompe-loel on a grand scale, play with the characteristics of their spaces to reveal what goes on behind the scenes. Here, the hidden mechanisms of the host space are pushed to their limits, uncovering disturbing flaws in a flagging socio-economic framework, in stark contrast with its former success. In effect, E. Lainé recasts these working environments as dystopic visions, be they biennials or contemporary art fairs, artist’s studios or museums. The spaces always appear to have been freshly deserted by their occupants – the artworks, the public, the artists. E. Lainé never fails to also address the local history that these occupied spaces are testament to, museums and cultural institutions of deindustrialisation, in the aftermath of modernism’s golden age, or new urban developments, barely constructed and already impoverished.

In 2018, for example, she re-envisioned the brutalist space of London’s Hayward Gallery. The institution, which had in the 1980s been dedicated to the discovery of contemporary artists, was transformed into an immense open plan workspace; its offices, normally invisible to the public, suddenly became part of the ruined landscape of capitalism. Here were camp beds, and here office equipment or personal items, hinting at the devotion of the model employee as first conceptualised in the nineteenth century. This autonomous, flexible worker, amenable to drudgery and willing to sleep at work if it meant an increase in productivity, calls to mind the analytical work of Pierre-Michel Menger (Portrait de l’artiste en travailleur, Métamorphoses du capitalisme, Seuil, 2003). Has the romantic myth of the artist inspired a certain sector of tertiary neoliberal work? It is the question suggested by the exhibition’s title, Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist, a Picasso quotation that was displayed in the lobby of the Google offices in Austin, United States. In an interview with Marie Brines in 2023, E. Lainé asked, “What will be art’s legacy now that a new ‘cool-economy’ is becoming the dominant model in the world of work and in the art world?” For the users of these spaces, her reimagined sets become the observation points of an increasingly aseptic, post-capitalist work environment.

E.Lainé graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Friche Belle de Mai (Marseille), the Hayward Gallery (London), the Fondation Luma (Arles), Bétonsalon and the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and as part of group shows at BNKR (Munich), the Van Gogh Foundation (Arles), the Mito Art Tower (Japan), the Yo-Chang Art Museum (Taiwan), the Villa Vassilieff (Paris) and the Lyon Biennial (2015).