︎ Marie Hervé (b.1996) is a visual artist, author and bookmaker living and working in Marseille, France.
ENSP Arles graduate, her work explores the notions of memory and ruin, conservation and cultural artefacts.
The use of the document, the limits of truth and falsity in photography and the relationship with our personal archives are recurrent motifs in her work - dealing with images from archaeological museum collections to sets of images compulsively recorded on mobile phones. Interested in the archive and the construction of visual narratives, she unearthed in 2018 a collection of more than 800 photographs retracing the travels of her ancestors, sailors, on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. This discovery will be the starting point of a research on historical and cultural constructions, evolving between photography, artist's book and writing.
Between 2018 and 2020, she worked in Malta and in Athens, and travelled between Greece, the south of France, the Maghreb, the Middle East and Italy. This trajectory has given rise, since 2020, to a project carried out in duo with fellow artist Elsa Martinez, Sand of noises. The project won the Eurazéo grant in 2021 and Jeune Photo Occitanie - Images Singulières, and has been exhibited at the Hôtel de l'Industrie (Paris), the Librairie du Palais gallery (Arles), KORA Center (Puglia, Italy) and AKC Museum (New York), among others.
She simultaneously built a practice of self-publishing and co-founded the collective and publishing house MYTO Publishing in 2021, developing projects related to the figure of the impostor and contemporary uses of the image.
In 2022, she participated in the research residencies A Natural Oasis? as well as Nuovo Grand Tour - KORA Center (Puglia, Italy) with the Institut Français Italia, and Soil Futures residency exchange - RIWAQ Palestine, with the support of the British Council. A monographic exhibition, ARCHIPEL(S), was dedicated to her solo and duo works at FRAC Paca (Marseille) in October 2022 as well as in unRepresented by Approche (Paris) and Galerie F. (Senlis, FR) in 2023.