“We’re still somehow attracted to AI’s fragilities – perhaps because they remind us of our own”
In the ArtReview Podcast, artists, thinkers and cultural figures are invited to choose three works as lenses through which to examine their practice and explore critical issues impacting the contemporary art world.
In our third episode, artist Noémie Goudal speaks to ArtReview editor J.J. Charlesworth about VR headsets, the challenges of representing time in photography and the buzzword ‘immersive’ in art.
Listen now on Spotify and YouTube. New episodes drop every fortnight. All of the works referenced in this podcast can be viewed below.
About Noémie Goudal
Noémie Goudal is a Paris-born artist working across installation, photography, film and moving image, whose practice explores themes of deep time, climate history and the fragility of landscapes. Her work was featured in the Azerbaijan Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and her installation The Story of Fixity was presented by Artangel in London at the end of 2025.
Credits
Interviewer: J.J. Charlesworth @charlesworthjj
Host and producer: Chiara Wilkinson @chiarawilkinson
Audio editor: Charlie Duffield
Music design: Iona Smith @ic_yonic
Works mentioned, in order of reference
• Noémie Goudal, The Story of Fixity (2025), takes the form of a three-channel film installation projected onto large screens, presented in a darkened room. The screens show moving landscapes that drip, dissolve and slowly deconstruct around the viewer, unfolding in 15-minute cycles. In keeping with the rest of Goudal’s practice, the work plays with optical illusion and ideas of perception, questioning assumptions of time and our place on earth in an era defined by environmental uncertainty.
• Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in His Study, c. 1475, can be viewed in the permanent collection of the National Gallery in London. It depicts the scholar and monk St Jerome seated at his desk while absorbed in reading. The whole scene is framed by a stone archway, which, along with windows opening to a distant landscape and the use of linear perspective, create a striking illusion of depth.
• Lumber, 2003. Photograph by British artist Anne Hardy, depicting a room piled high with what appear to be discarded Christmas trees within a room that feels artificial, contained and on the verge of collapse.
• Noémie Goudal, Les Amants (Cascade), 2009. Photograph of two large white sheets suspended from a piece of string set within a wooded landscape, creating an illusion of a waterfall flowing into a river below.
• Rei Naito: Matrix, 2010. In-situ installation where water slowly emerges from tiny holes in the floor, gathering into droplets that form into small springs. These eventually evaporate and enter the opening in the ceiling as rainwater, referencing the natural water cycle.
