© Ariane Toussaint
Laurence Aëgerter’s extensive œuvre comprises of photographic series, site-specific installations, community projects and artist’s books, addressing the permanent transformation that lies in the essence of things. By making an inventive use of archives and existing images from illustrated books to museum collections, she examines the archive that shapes our collective memory. Displacement and translation play an important part in her work.
Laurence Aëgerter won the Nestlé International Prize for Photography, Festival Images Vevey 2015 and the Author Book Award at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles 2018. Actes Sud published her monograph, Ici mieux qu’en face in 2021. In 2023 she is a laureate of the French national photographic assignment and received a carte blanche photographique by the Monuments Nationaux de France.
Her transcultural and transhistorical practice reflects on the meaning of the image in relation to identity and shared memories. In recent years she shifted her focus to the fragile edges of the human mind and applied her playful appropriation of images in collaborative projects involving, among others, patients dealing with mental health issues, neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists.
She has exhibited in several international solo and group shows and made site-specific installations and art in community projects in assignment for several cities and museums. A selection of solo exhibitions include: Ici mieux qu’en face (Musée du Petit Palais Paris); Cathédrales (Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles); Le Louvre (MA-MAC Nice); Arithmetic of photographic perception (Forum für Fotografie Cologne); Herbarium Cataplasma (Fries Museum Leeuwarden); The Modernists and More (Hermitage Museum Amsterdam).
Her works are included in private and public collections of a.o. Paul Getty Center Los Angeles, The New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, Museum of the Mind Haarlem, Fries Museum Leeuwarden, Museum van Loon Amsterdam, MAMAC Nice, Sèvres Manufacture et musées nationaux and BnF Bibliothèque Nationale de France Paris.