04 Nov 2025
From Viral Texts to Sculptural Hymns: A Conversation with David Douard
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
“From a strictly sculptural point of view, I try to ensure that the forms themselves resist. A work should not be locked into a fixed meaning. Here, I want a part of poetry and misunderstanding to remain. A sculpture should remain a good sculpture, no matter what meaning is attached to it.”
French artist David Douard’s practice unfolds at the intersection of digital detritus, urban materiality, and fragments of poetic language, where the fleeting traces of our hyperconnected world collide with the stubborn physicality of sculptural form. For more than a decade, he has gathered unfiltered streams of online comments, anonymous poems, viral texts, and private messages, turning this raw and chaotic vocabulary into hybrid assemblages that speak in their own voices—sometimes fragile, sometimes defiant. His installations often feel both domestic and alien, intimate yet estranged, conjuring environments that reflect the fractured rhythms of post-digital existence while refusing the totalizing spectacle of screens and data flows. In Douard’s world, language mutates into matter; emotion and resistance become sculptural gestures; and the technological sublime is reimagined as something porous, ambiguous, and insistently human.
Born in 1983 in Perpignan, France, Douard belongs to a generation of artists shaped by the simultaneous acceleration of information and the disintegration of boundaries between the virtual and the real. After graduating from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2011, he soon developed a singular voice within the European art scene, now teaching at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris–Cergy while exhibiting internationally. His trajectory has been marked by acclaimed solo shows at institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2014, 2018), the Serralves Museum in Porto (2022), and UCCA Dune in China (2023). Equally present in major group exhibitions—including the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2019), the Fridericianum in Kassel (2015), and SculptureCenter in New York (2014)—Douard has also brought his work to a global stage through biennials in Lyon (2013), Taipei (2014), and Gwangju (2018). A residency at the Villa Medici in Rome (2017–18) deepened his engagement with questions of space and materiality, while the Fondazione Ettore Fico Prize in 2017 recognized his distinctive contribution to contemporary sculpture. Today, his works reside in prominent collections such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, FRAC Île-de-France, CNAP, and the Serralves Museum.
Permanent Hymns, his most recent exhibition at Chantal Carousel gallery, held earlier this year, extended these concerns into a new register. Here, Douard strips away overt technological interfaces—no screens, no speakers—to reveal how images, objects, and gestures themselves can radiate the intensity of our networked age. Mirrors warp and multiply perspectives; discarded fragments and anonymous words fuse into sculptural organisms charged with emotion, ambiguity, and metamorphosis. The result is an environment that feels at once feral and meditative, an open, almost spiritual counterpoint to the empire of data surrounding us. It is as if Douard seeks to carve out pockets of resistance and wonder amid the noise of the digital, offering viewers not explanations, but invitations—to dwell, to feel, to listen to the murmurs of a world constantly remade.
Alexander Burenkov: Your work is rooted in language gathered from the internet—comments, poems, anonymous text—turned into sculptural form. How does this viral language transform when embedded materially in your sculptures?
David Douard: Rather than saying that my work is rooted in language, I prefer to say that I give words a place in my work, just like any other materials, objects, or ready-mades. I want to give a materiality to what is retrieved from the internet. It's not just about putting words into a sculpture, but also about addressing the idea of language, of writing—ideas that, for me, are expressed through the very notion of assemblage. I bring together ideas, intentions; I form a sentence, I try to build a story.
AB: You describe creating an “infected environment” in your installations, blending digital fantasy and real-world surfaces. In Permanent Hymns, how do you use that idea to reflect on post-digital life?
DD: Post-digital life is a world where all information is placed on the same level, where everything seems to mean the same thing, where everything we see is part of a big “mess” in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to find one’s bearings. In Permanent Hymns, I try to do something with that mess, to hijack it so that it speaks for itself. In this approach, one object found its place in the work: the mirrored sphere, which reflects, but—more importantly for me—duplicates, exaggerates, and directly highlights the particularities of this post-digital world.
AB: Your texts often feature frustration, deviance, illness—lines that feel chaotic. Why do these emotional registers speak to you in the digital age, and how do they resonate in your last shows?
DD: It is actually emotions that speak to me the most. For me, they are what constitute a form of resistance against an empire that seeks to swallow everything. These are states that are ultimately quite positive because they express a refusal of what is given and open up toward something else. When I work, I search for a vocabulary that cannot be immediately grasped. I want it to resist the state of things. Chaos, since we are talking about chaos, is the place where we no longer understand things directly, where language is no longer the one we are used to, and where a new world is created.
AB: You reference techno-animism—imbuing inert objects with lifelike agency via technology. How does Permanent Hymns give voice or motion to the digital detritus of post-digital culture?
DD: In Permanent Hymns, it is one of the first exhibitions where I use neither screens nor speakers. These media, so present in our lives, used to cluster around the pieces to broadcast digital fragments. I wanted to move away from this idea of a totalizing spectacle where everything is present, including sound, light and image. I wanted the works to speak in a different way. The digital spectacle is already everywhere. I no longer need screens to evoke it. The works exude it anyway.
AB: In previous shows, form often arises from data and text—for example, sculptures pivoting on vocal emotion. Does Permanent Hymns continue this lineage of sculptural responsiveness to digital traces?
David Douard: Even if there are no more screens or speakers, the image still remains. Spat out by a printer, images stick to the works. Lifeless bodies, knocked out by meaningless slogans, coexist alongside purely sculptural gestures. I am not really trying to talk about these digital traces, but rather to arrange what I see, what speaks to me through objects.
AB: I saw your previous show O’Ti’Lulabies, at Serralves museum, where you’ve described hacking consumer tech to give it new subjectivity. How does Permanent Hymns assert a similar resistance or reinterpretation of digital tools?
DD: Resistance exists for me because meaning remains open. The works are not primarily about technology or our relationship to it. I want to remind people that it is not just about that. Often, it is actually the thing that interests me the least. I would rather talk about love stories than science fiction. Also, from a strictly sculptural point of view, I try to ensure that the forms themselves resist. A work should not be locked into a fixed meaning. Here, I want a part of poetry and misunderstanding to remain. A sculpture should remain a good sculpture, no matter what meaning is attached to it.
AB: Your installations blend domestic, urban, and virtual spaces into one hybrid environment. For example, how did the gallery space in Chantal Carousel become, in your case, a hybrid container for post-digital discourse?
DD: Here we are talking about space. It is true that my work is often closely tied to the space that hosts it. This time, I wanted to try something different with it. To use lighter scenographic gestures and focus more on the works themselves. It is a different kind of exercise. For me, doing this is a way of rejecting the spectacle that takes place outside the gallery. It is about making the exhibition into something different, something that stands in contrast to the outside world. In that sense, the gallery can become a receptacle for a discussion about the post-digital.
AB: The Darknet, YouTube comments, anonymous sources—these fuel your archive. What part of that hidden/unfiltered language corpus is most visible in this last show?
DD: I listen to a lot of music when I work, and I like to think that this music gets inscribed into the artworks. I believe in a fairly direct relationship between art and life. It is a vision that might seem quite romantic, but one that I believe in deeply. I do not need to think about the language I inscribe in the works, it will attach itself on its own in an almost unconscious way. All it takes is for me to watch a YouTube video or read a poem, and the next day it will appear in a piece. During the period when I was working on this show, I watched Nowhere by Gregg Araki, whose title I spontaneously printed out and pasted onto certain sculptures, for example. There is also the idea of making a tribute to the things I love, and to add some of what I live into the works.
AB: You’ve mentioned Tetsumi Kudo and the idea of mutation—melding dissimilar elements into a new organism. Are there particular mutations or metamorphic moments you’d point to in Permanent Hymns? Can you speak more about your recent sources of inspiration from digital culture?
DD: Obviously, metamorphoses always end up appearing. It is once the objects are brought together and connected by these metal bars (which, for me, are like pencil strokes) that the mutation is complete. Placing a lamp inside a sculpture is, for me, a way of integrating it into a domestic space, of taking it out of its condition as a sculpture. Light brings all the other elements of a work into an entirely different dynamic. In the same way, the mirrors used completely transform the perception of the piece. These are mirrors that are usually used for surveillance, in other words, they extend our vision. I like this idea of an excess of vision, of being able to see something that would otherwise be impossible to grasp.
AB: The title Permanent Hymns evokes ritual and repetition. How do you transform transient online poetry into something sacred—or permanent? And why you gave such a title to the show?
DD: As I said before, a lot of things come through the music I listen to. Permanent Hymns is inspired by an album by The Verve. So yes, there are ideas of ritual and repetition that are inherent to artistic work. Something that comes through gesture, in connection with life. This title is there to invite you into this dynamic, to transmit an energy, and to make the works resonate with something almost spiritual.
AB: As tools evolve beyond internet—toward immersive, ambient mediums —how do you see your work evolving? Where do Permanent Hymns sit in the trajectory of post-digital culture?
DD: I am trying to reflect on this idea of immersiveness; everything is becoming immersive, private spaces, the streets. I do not want my work to become a copy of what the empire offers; I prefer to look for ways to deactivate its directives. It is toward a certain vitality in relation to the practice of art that I want to remain. Keeping this idea in mind is, for me, a way of staying sincere.
No matter what we do, post-digital culture will always speak, we live inside it. So there is no need to try to speak about it. As a result, Permanent Hymns is inscribed within this culture, but not only: it also speaks about music, friendship, and poetry.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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03 Nov 2025
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By Alexander Burenkov
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