Throughout the 1990s, Florence Lazar worked primarily within the genre of photographic portraiture; by the end of the decade, however, she had begun to incorporate video into her practice. Her choice of a new medium coincided with her desire to respond, as an artist, to the on-going crisis
in Yugoslavia. Family and social ties to the former Yugoslavia had seen her follow the crisis intensely since it had broken out a decade earlier. Les "Paysans" (2000),
is part of a cycle of documentary video and film works that chronicle attempts to establish individual and collective responsibility for the ensuing armed conflict. Since then documentary has remained at the forefront of her practice.
In 2014, the cycle culminated in her third full-length film, "Kamen" [The Stones], which reveals recent attempts–both religious and cultural–to rewrite the past in order to reinforce rather than combat the denial of collective responsibility.
In 2008, she returned to her previous work in portraiture, which she combined with an innovative renewal of documentary photography. The resulting series documents printed ephemera from her father’s political trajectory. Her young son serves in the series as both model and generational conduit; he likewise appears in the video "Confessions d’un jeune militant," in which he assists his grandfather as he comments on the books that helped shape his intellectual formation.
By shifting from one primary source of subject formation to another–from family to school, Florence Lazar produced a series of 35 photographs inaugurated as a public work in 2016 for the Collège Aimé Césaire, a junior high school in Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement. A tribute to the school’s celebrated namesake in collaboration with the school’s pupils,
the series shows that an objective engagement with France’s colonial past, far from perpetuating social and racial divisions or a sense of national guilt, can lead to a shared acknowledgement of history.
"125 hectares" (2019), returns to the pastoral theme of
"Les Paysans". The video stems from a larger investigation begun in Martinique, Césaire’s birthplace, into the long-term ecological and health effects of chlordecone (Kepone), a carcinogenic insecticide used for more than 20 years on the island’s banana plantations.
Taken from Césaire’s play "Une tempête" – a postcolonial adaptation of Shakespeare’s "The Tempest" – the title of her recent film "You think the earth is a dead thing" evokes not only the ecological ravages of colonialism, but equally the emancipatory potential of history.
Pursuing her investigation into the ecological situation in Martinique, her film "Sous les feuilles" (2014) focuses on a particular place: Anse Bellay, a cemetery for enslaved people, which reappeared after Hurricane Dean struck. At the psychiatric hospital, the idea is conceived to associate this piece of land by the sea with a novel therapeutic approach. The film gives space to these intertwining narratives, creating a dialogue between the living, the ancestors, the memory of plants, the substrates, the fruits displaced by the waterways, and the invisible.
Florence Lazar's work lies at the crossroads of contemporary art and cinema.
It was presented in a [solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume](https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/florence-lazar/) in 2019 as well as in numerous museums and art centers, including the BLMK in Cottbus, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Art Jameel in Dubai, and [Spore Initiative](https://spore-initiative.org/en/programming/participate/welto-and-the-sacred-bush) in Berlin. Her work has also been shown at major international events, including the 12th edition of Sonsbeek, the Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse (2021), the A Dobradiça Biennial in Portugal (2023), and the 61st Venice Art Biennale.
Her films have been screened at major international festivals such as Cinéma du Réel in Paris, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the Amazonie Caraïbes documentary film festival in French Guiana, the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and FIDMarseille.
Several of her films have won awards, including “Kamen” and “Sous les feuilles” at Cinéma du Réel, in 2014 and [2024](https://archives.cinemadureel.org/film/sous-les-feuilles/) respectively; “Tu crois que la terre est chose morte” at the Les Révoltés de l'histoire festival and the Euganea Festival in 2020; and “Les Bosquets,” which received an award from the Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée in 2012.