Tania Mouraud, “ AD NAUSEAM

From September 20th, 2014 to January 25th, 2015
Friday, September 19th, 2014, at 6:30 PM

To start the fall season, MAC/VAL is presenting “AD NAUSEAM”, a solo exhibition of Tania Mouraud, a major figure in French contemporary art whose art poses questions about the human condition. This exhibition will include work co-produced with Ircam-Centre Pompidou, monumental hangings on the exterior of the museum as well as throughout the city of Vitry-sur-Seine.

A word from the Exhibition Curator

Ever since she started out as an artist, Tania Mouraud has continually deterritorialised and reterritorialised her practice. Regularly calling into question the form of her work, she nevertheless continues her exploration tenaciously and resolutely between concept and perceptible space. In 1989, Loïc Malle described, it seemed to me, what sounded like the programme, the key element, the principle of Tania Mouraud’s work, the principle at work: a ‘critical awareness of the subject in its perceptive, cognitive and linguistic relation to the world’ (Tania Mouraud, CAC Pablo Neruda).

‘This is what I saw,’ she tells us. But what is seeing? What do we see? _ Is there something to see beyond that which is visible, there in front of us? Tania Mouraud’s images have the distinction of containing all the images of the world. To see is to continually attempt to resolve an enigma, to attempt to discover a different reality from the one we perceive. To see, to create images, is to bring out meaning, give sense to something. Before every image, we are in search of the missing image. For Pascal Quignard, the visible is not enough to understand what is seen; the visible can only be interpreted with reference to the invisible. ‘There is an image missing in every image. . . . The image that is to be seen, which is before being seen, is missing in the image’ (Sur l’image qui manque à nos jours, Arléa, 2014).

For the ‘AD NAUSEAM’ exhibition, it was decided to give prominence to two paths followed by Tania Mouraud in her work. Apparently contradictory and antagonistic, they are nevertheless complementary. The exhibition thus plays on such polarities as inside/outside, high/low and physicality/abstraction. Tania Mouraud’s works invite us to slow down, to free ourselves from speed. Tania Mouraud creates an art of meditation.

On the one hand, the museum space is occupied by a monumental audiovisual installation; on the other, writings (banners on the façade, admission tickets, posters in the town) contaminate the surrounding urban space. On the one hand, images in movement and sounds; on the other, text images, phrases. On the one hand, the muted violence of AD NAUSEAM; on the other, ‘MEMEPASPEUR’, ‘CEUXQUINEPEUVENTSERAPPELERLEPASSESONTCONDAMNESALEREPETER’ and ‘IHAVEADREAM’. On the one hand, the programmed, mechanical destruction of the living; on the other, the affirmation of a resistance, of a collective dream. On the one hand, the report on a permanent disaster; on the other, the ephemeral affirmation of a hope nevertheless. On the one hand, a machinic universe that grinds and crushes ad libitum; on the other hand, a call to human consciences. On the one hand, the noise of fog, metaphor; on the other, a plunge into the world and the letter. On the one hand, a permanent recombination of images and sounds to construct a mental space in phase with bodies; on the other, writings that interrupt, induce a pause in, the flux of reality. Here and there, the same desire to slow down. Here and there, the journeys of the eye, the body and the mind.

Presentation

To start the fall season, MAC/VAL is presenting “AD NAUSEAM”, a solo exhibition of Tania Mouraud, a major figure in French contemporary art whose art poses questions about the human condition. This exhibition will include work co-produced with Ircam-Centre Pompidou, monumental hangings on the exterior of the museum as well as throughout the city of Vitry-sur-Seine.

A monumental audiovisual installation will occupy the entire area reserved for temporary exhibitions, confronting the visitor with one of the artist’s main themes, Man’s destruction of his own history, evoked here by images of the mass liquidation of books in a recycling plant. The treatment of books as a testimony of history can also be understood as a metaphor for the destruction of thought. Like a paintbrush on canvas, Tania Mouraud uses the camera to capture reality and make a statement.

The bulldozers grinding through books at a frantic pace cannot help but call up other images of History in the collective memory. Emptied of all human presence, these multi-layered images are projected on three screens that seem to overflow with unending disaster. This video, exhibited here for the first time, is accompanied by a sound installation realized by Tania Mouraud during her residence at Ircam from 2013 to 2014.

This project emphasizes the aggressive nature of machines and reinforces the power and the tragic and destructive nature of Mankind’s irreversible actions, actions condemned by everything that might be learned from past errors.

This assembly of 1500 samples of mechanical, industrial sounds reinforces the violence of the machine, creating the sonorous equivalent of its visual dynamic. Sound, used as a weapon, draws us into the image, just as the image draws us into the sound. With this video triptych nearly 35 meters long and 7 meters high and a sound installation spatialized on thirty speakers, the exhibition hall becomes a space in which the visitor lives, reflects upon, and has a sensory experience of a mechanized, industrial universe.

Tania Mouraud has also created work for the exterior of the museum, extending her writing process in a public space. For over twenty years, she has created abstract paintings in which she inscribes phrases that are more graphic than they are legible in a typographic style that has since become very recognizable. Although she began by using iconic and political phrases that could be understood as slogans, they have become increasingly intimate, sensitive, emotional, poetic, universal, akin to phrases of resistance. They are often reused in her performances.

Mouraud will take over the lateral facade of the museum, some forty meters long, with the phrase
CEUXQUINEPEUVENTSERAPPELERLEPASSESONTCONDAMNESALEREPETER.
(THOSEWHOCANNOT REMEMBERTHEPASTARECONDEMNEDTOREPEAT IT.) This sentence reminds Mankind of its lack of self-reflection in the face of History. It echoes the installation AD NAUSEUM shown inside the museum and provides an object for reflection upon our engagement as citizens faced with the state of our world. Another work, posted on the on the front of the museum takes up the expression

Works

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