Prune Nourry
Challenging ethics through passionate performances
“The most important things are health, art and love”.
Prune Nourry is a passionate, socially engaged artist. Her work explores the body, sex, healing and bioethics. Her sculptures, installations and performances are staged, destroyed and buried – all documented with photography and video. Gender imbalances through sex selection is a major theme. In Holy Daughters (2010) she created hybrid sculptures of cows and girls. Cows are sacred fertile symbols, and she chose girls to challenge the preference of boys in India. After surviving cancer at the age of thirty-one, Nourry created the film Serendipity (2019). It documented her illness and healing, f...
Prune Nourry is a passionate, socially engaged artist. Her work explores the body, sex, healing and bioethics. Her sculptures, installations and performances are staged, destroyed and buried – all documented with photography and video. Gender imbalances through sex selection is a major theme. In Holy Daughters (2010) she created hybrid sculptures of cows and girls. Cows are sacred fertile symbols, and she chose girls to challenge the preference of boys in India. After surviving cancer at the age of thirty-one, Nourry created the film Serendipity (2019). It documented her illness and healing, feeding back into universal questions of the human body and survival.
Nourry uses humour to challenge political issues. In 2011, she parked a Spermbar truck in New York City, and asked people to donate sperm symbolically by filling out a donor application form online. Each trait was then linked to an ingredient. Assisted by nurses, passersby could select their preferred qualities from a menu to produce a unique and random flavour. Nourry then dispensed these test tube drinks alongside information like education levels, fitness, religions, and hobbies. She did this to highlight the commodification of new fertility scientific techniques. Conducted in a fun way, Nourry encouraged people to question the ethics of a growing industry. As she puts it “I am an artist who puts on the skin of a sociologist”.
Prune Nourry (she/her) was born in 1985 in Paris. She lives and works between Paris and New York.
One of Prune Nourry's first performances was called Le Dîner Procréatif (2009). Guests were served frozen eggs as a starter, followed by almond paste replicas of her nipples.
In 2019 Nourry participated in the first annual TIME 100 Health Summit in New York City. Alongside world leaders, she discussed perspectives on health and wellness.
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