Ceysson & Bénétière

Striking chords

Medley presents Tania Mouraud's plural, powerful and committed work. Historical pieces are brought into dialogue with recent research, from the Black Power series of the 1980s to the Shmues series, that the artist has been exploring since 2019. Some pieces, such as Trap (1990), from the Black Continent series, are presented here for the first time in France. The artist's sharp and fine writings, created in the form of prints, bas-reliefs, a mural or by embossing, stand near dark, saturated or immaculate landscapes. Besod, the performance that the artist activates, mixes phrases, images, bird songs, animal cries, gun noises and shouts chanted in protests. It traces a red thread that links the works, like a constant interrogation: what relationships do we choose to have with what surrounds us ?

The photographs and the video take us to strange places, that the humankind has both deserted and marked. Unless it has lost its way. The disturbing swamps of Film Noir (2011-2021) lead to the forests of Désastres (2014) as negatives, to reveal the dark voids left by the felled trees near Saint-Étienne. In Mitzpe Ramon, 200km south of Jerusalem, Tania Mouraud films the red desert of Primetime (2005). In the distance, she hears the Israeli military aviation exercises. Slowly, the camera skims a panorama one might think was filmed on Mars, that a strange, even disquieting sound accompanies. Its mechanical clatter evokes fighting machines, or perhaps an extraterrestrial contact. Elsewhere, remnants of an 80-year-old conflict, the concrete blocks of Backstage (2013) align on the horizon like silences on a score. Built for Operation Overlord (also known as the Battle of Normandy) in 1944, they float offshore like elements of an old set, reminding us how close the violence and horror of war can be.

If we don't want a future of bunkers, what horizon do we choose to compose? Immense, vindictive, rebellious, Tania Mouraud's writings unfold in space. They invite us to question our perception of the world and to write another one. By emptying the letters of Ça et là (1990, Black Power series), the artist shows us the white wall instead of words, making the letters disappear to show the space between them. The Frises (from 1992), written in a negative way, black-on-white, also materialize the usually invisible part of the letters, forcing a reversal of our perception. Thirty years later, the sentences that the artist deploys in Yiddish also reveal what is invisible or destroyed (Shmues, since 2019). Through the materialization of this language without territory or borders and almost destroyed during the Holocaust, and through the words themselves. In the Canvas series (2023), the artist traces the names of women from the Bible and goddesses of Greek mythology. While Western art history often depicts them as nude objects, Tania Mouraud asserts their status as subjects by naming them. Through a vibrant treatment of the writing, she gives them a new body, a powerful body of text, far from the one formed by the patriarchal gaze. Illegible, they escape all appropriation by sight and mind. The writings elude us, until fleeing the exhibition space: Ikhbinnishtgeboyrnzikh untertsugeben (« I was not born to submit », 2024) spreads in the city, released from the four walls of the exhibition space.

Through her work, the artist aims to « build a world where [she] can die in peace ». Thus, she invites us into such a space by creating a white room where the simple white cube becomes a secluded haven of rest, isolated from the frenetic pace of daily life. Here, Initiation space n°5 (1969) seems to invite us to contemplate the surroundings. A pebble has emerged from the concrete mass, as if polished by the waves. It looks like a zafu, the traditional Zen meditation cushion. Perhaps our perception of the world can be refined too, exercised already by the numerous writings in the exhibition. All of them, while eluding us, invite us to make an effort to read or to abandon ourselves to the sign. In this white room, sculpted from paper, the Gaufrages series (2023) translates everyday expressions that rarely find recognition in contemporary art spaces. Here, the contrast between black and white disappears: signs emerge from the very surface. Their delicacy echoes with the Nostalgia and Emergences (2019) series, in which vegetation traces the sign of its existence in the snowy landscape of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

Like a musical composition, the themes that run through Medley follow and respond to each other. A harmony rises in the space, where recent pieces resonate with historical works. A refrain is heard by those who listen, tirelessly reminding us the artist’s fight for peaceful relations of the humankind with (and within) the world.

Cécile Renoult, 2024