Sara Favriau

Sara Favriau questions both the artwork and its ecosystem; its circularity. She convokes forms, symbols and processes of a popular nature in order to transpose them, and through which sculptures, installations, performances are in dialogue: a hut, a pirogue, a bow, a tree, voguing... are elements that are part of her formal and conceptual vocabulary and carry their own dramaturgy, their poetic enactment. It is an encounter between past, present and future that Sara Favriau has been developing for years. How the past and its heritage, linked to progress and discovery, how these three temporalities, their specific methods, can be - by their pooling - singular. This crossbreeding is at the heart of her intentions: to interweave metamorphosis, fiction, and essay, either in a simple form or essential actions. Like a pirogue-tree that crosses a sea to find a forest. A work that is being renewed, and through this questions its sanctuary status (exhibition, acquisition), towards a possible status of the living (evolving work, re-enacted, transformed, altered…). A virtuous mixture that she also approaches with humour, whose poetic form, which is dear to her even in the titles of her works, is a force for proposal.

Sara Favriau is the winner of the 2015 “Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo”. In 2016, Sara Favriau has benefited from a 600 sqm-personal exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris: La redite en somme, ne s’amuse pas de sa répétition singulière. In 2017, she had a solo-show at Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (FR), Independent Brussels and made a residency: Arts and the world of work with Ministry of Culture, in partnership with the CNEAI. In 2018, she represented France at the first Bangkok Biennale Beyond Bliss as a guest of honor. In 2019, she conducted the French Los Angeles Exchange (FLAX) residency and participated to the first Rabat Biennale. In 2020, she started a long term collaboration with INRAe and the biologists of UFM (Unité des Forêts Méditerranéenne). She was invited by Villa Noailles for the Festival International de la Mode, where she exhibited an installation of sculpted trees originated from a plot of forest studied by INRAe which is next to Marseille. In 2021, a tree-pirogue crossed trough the Mediterranean Sea, from les salins des Pesquiers in Hyères, where the pirogue was made, to the Fondation Carmignac on Porquerolles Island. In 2021/2022, she made a residency of the Royal Commission RCU and the French Agency Afalula, organized by Manifesto in AlUla in Saudi Arabia.

The work of Sara Favriau is present in many public collections: FMAC (collection of the city of Paris), FDAC Essonne, FRAC Normandie Caen, FRAC Centre, MAC VAL (permanent installation), BAB (Bangkok Art Biennale)…