Laure Prouvost. Wantee.

Want tea?

In 2013 Tate Britain opened Schwitters in Britain, running from 30 January to 12 May. It was the first major exhibition on the late work of Kurt Schwitters, the German Dada artist. He arrived in Britain in 1940 as a refugee, after the Nazi government condemned his work as degenerate. He died in Cumbria in 1948.

At the end of the exhibition, two contemporary artists were commissioned, with Grizedale Arts, to respond to Schwitters's legacy. One of them was Laure Prouvost, a French artist based in London.

Her work was called Wantee. That was the nickname of Schwitters's companion in his last years. She had a habit of asking everyone: want tea? She asked it so often that the question became her name.

Prouvost took the word as her starting point. Wantee is a video installation built around a film of 14 minutes.

An invented grandfather

The main character of Wantee is Prouvost's grandfather. In the story she tells, he was a conceptual artist and a close friend of Schwitters. He never existed. She built him out of voice, images, objects and a family arranged around him.

Prouvost's videos are known for very fast cutting. Images leap from one close up to the next. Words appear on screen, sometimes matching the voice, sometimes drifting away from it. Tate describes her approach through a few elements: strong storytelling, quick cuts, montage and a deliberate misuse of language. Viewers have to join the fragments themselves, and each joins them differently.

The video does not stand alone. It plays inside a space set up like the grandfather's home, with furniture and objects, as if he had just stepped out. The line between film and room blurs. Visitors walk into the story instead of only watching it.

At a performance at Tate Britain on 27 April 2013, Prouvost led the audience in search of this grandfather. Tea was served, in honour of the woman called Wantee.

Schwitters and everyday material

To see why a tea party can answer Schwitters, recall how he worked. He invented the idea of Merz: using any conceivable material for artistic purposes. String, cotton wool, a pram wheel, bus tickets, sweet wrappers. For him they were equal to paint.

In 1945 he moved to the Lake District and began bringing natural objects into his work. His last great project was the Merz Barn, a farm building turned into an artwork.

Prouvost carries that spirit on in her own way. She does not remake Merz. She takes the most ordinary material in Schwitters's daily life, an offer of tea, and puts it at the centre. The invented grandfather is a way of entering art history through the kitchen door rather than the front one.

The Turner Prize and after

At the end of 2013 Prouvost won the Turner Prize. For the first time in its history the exhibition was held in Northern Ireland, at Ebrington in Derry~Londonderry, during the city's year as UK City of Culture. The other shortlisted artists were Tino Sehgal, David Shrigley and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

She was nominated for Wantee and for a two part installation made for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, developed during a residency in Italy and shown with the Whitechapel Gallery. Many were surprised by her win. The chair of the jury said the work was both very intimate and quite outward facing.

Wantee is remembered because it does something rare: it uses fiction to speak about a real person without saying anything false about them. It also sits close to Alison Knowles's salad, where a kitchen task walks straight into the gallery. A teapot, a question, a grandfather who never lived. And a room people want to stay in a little longer.