Hoël Duret, NFT pH<7. 2017.
Image courtesy of the artist and ADAGP, Paris.

Hoël Duret is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects begin with developing a fictional story that playfully gathers and questions various narrative styles and registers; in a meta-fictional way, the narrative process itself becomes equally important as the resulting artwork. Duret writes his projects into scripts with scenes, characters and chapters, summoning the forms and mediums that best resonate with the narrative in question. Hoël’s scripts deliver a critical and humorous vision of the prevailing cultural movements, rigid concepts and ideas, codified schools of thought: all things that intend to organise the world into a consistent, simple and reassuring entity. His approach has resulted in a corpus of artworks filled with installations, videos, performance, paintings and sculptures, referencing cinema, design, dance, music and literature. During his stay in Aotearoa New Zealand Duret will be working on what he calls “cli-fi”, a climate fiction film that takes place in New Zealand after a series of events that bring together a group of young people with an attempt to understand the situation through alternative perspectives on ecology.

Hoël Duret (b. 1988) lives and works between Paris and Nantes. He holds an MFA from the ESBA Nantes and is a founding member of PanoramaRoad, a production company for performing and visual arts. Hoël’s works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in France at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Palais de Tokyo, the Palais Garnier - Paris national Opera for the FIAC 2016 (Grand Palais), the FRAC des Pays de la Loire and Le Meurice Palace Hotel. Internationally his works have been exhibited at Yishu 8 (Beijing), the Seoul Art Museum, the MUDAM National Museum (Luxembourg), the Palazzo Strozzi (Florence), the Palazzo delle Stelline (Milan), the Tel Aviv Art Museum and the Ford Theatres (Los Angeles). Hoël is preparing for a major solo exhibition at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen (Germany) in 2020.

Hoël Duret.

Supported by The French Embassy in New Zealand