Verena Paravel

Verena Paravel was in residence at LUMA Arles from September to December 2025.

Verena Paravel is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She joined Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab in 2007. Her academic and artistic interests encompass urban ecology, the environment, acoustemology, as well as the poetics and politics of the body and mind. Her works include 7 Queens (2008), Foreign Parts (2010), Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with a Hook? (2012—2016) from which Leviathan is derived (2012), Ah humanity! (2015), somniloquies (2017), Commensal (2017), Caniba (2018), and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022).

7 Queens is an anti-ethnographic video that documents ephemeral encounters that occurred during a walk beneath the Number 7 subway line in New York City. Foreign Parts (with J.P. Sniadecki) is a film that portrays the neighborhood of Willets Point, a hidden industrial zone fated for demolition in the shadow of the New York Mets' new stadium, where wrecks, refuse and recycling form a thriving commerce. Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with a Hook? (with Lucien Castaing-Taylor) is a four-part project about humanity and the sea, and our plundering of marine resources. Ah humanity! (with Ernst Karel and Castaing-Taylor) is an installation that takes the March 11, 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Fukushima as its point of departure and reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the so-called Anthropocene. somniloquies (with Castaing-Taylor) is a film about dreams and desire based on the sound archive of Dion McGregor, who is considered the world's most garrulous sleep talker. Commensal is an installation, and Caniba a film, that both explore the ontology of cannibalism and sibling rivalry through the prism of Issei and Jun Sagawa. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (with Castaing-Taylor) is a film about anatomy, medical imagery, and the politics of healthcare in Paris' public hospitals.

She is currently working on two films, one about psychoanalysis and the other about the acoustics of ecosystems. Her work is in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, and has been exhibited at Venice Biennale (2017), documenta 14, Tate, Barbican, Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1, MoMA, MASS MoCA, MAMM Medellín, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, Berlin Kunsthalle, Shanghai Biennale (2014), and Aichi Triennale (2017). Her films and videos have screened at Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, New York, Toronto, Vienna, Venice and other film festivals.