This exhibition is visually spare, but goes straight to the heart of the paradoxes that define coastal Louisiana. French artist and Venice Biennale award winner Camille Henrot uses videos and symbolic objects to portray Louisiana's receding coast and the people it supports. By implicitly comparing it to Brittany's mythic city of Ys--which was lost to the sea after the devil seduced the king's daughter into giving him the key to the dyke that protected it--Henrot evokes Louisiana's Faustian bargain with the oil industry, which over decades ravaged vast expanses of marshes that once protected our cities, indirectly causing them to flood. Her subplot is the plight of the Houma Indians, those modest yet resilient inhabitants of Louisiana's coast whose own Faustian bargain involved adopting the language of their Cajun neighbors, with whom they sometimes intermarried. Their flair for cultural camouflage enabled them to effectively blend in, but it also caused the federal Department of Indian Affairs to routinely deny their appeals for official tribal status. Henrot records their travails as they try to deal with modern America and its powerful oil industry as their ancestral lands continue to wash out from under them.
