Tatiana Trouvé
Il Grande Ritratto
6 February – 16 May, 2010
Opening: Friday, 5 February, 2010
Curator: Adam Budak
Lendkai 1, A–8020 Graz
T +43-316/8017-9200
kunsthausgraz [at] museum-joanneum.at
Kunsthaus Graz is pleased to announce the very first in Austria, solo exhibition Il Grande Ritratto by one of the leading artists of the younger generation, Tatiana Trouvé. An organizer of disappearance and a sculptress of echoes and daydreams, Tatiana Trouvé in her mainly large scale installations, sculptures and drawings defines what the artist herself articulates as “ways of world-making and ways of being in the world.” In her portrait of industrial failure and an allegory of the posthuman condition on the edge of collapse, Trouvé depicts the world which needs an explanation. A vacuum of a dehumanized nest, uncannily soaked with a physicality of the absent body and the atmospheric qualities of the world on the edge of the real and the phantasmagoric, Trouvé’s universe chronicles the current psychological and political status of humanity in the precarious moment of doubt and exhaustion, on the threshold of a necessary, new beginning. Her work is the expression of the artist’s own particular act of mourning over the dismembered body of endangered nature, a rite of passage in regards to the unpredictabilities of the future society. Trouvé’s mise-en-scène of contemporary spatial desire is a performance of “flat desire, but in perspective”: marginalized, hidden and invisible, an effect of excess and overload, wasted expenditure in fact, a diagram of secret and enigma…
Tatiana Trouvé with her monumental installation Il Grande Ritratto, conceived especially for the Kunsthaus Graz, converts the lower level of the Kunsthaus into a truly subjective realm: an inner post-apocalyptic landscape with spatial autonomy and strength, inspired by a science-fiction novel, Il Grande Ritratto (1960) by the Italian master of literary neo-avant-garde, Dino Buzzati, an uncanny story of science and love, fiction and reality, secrecy and dreams, an assemblage of desire, space and utopia. Buzzati’s oeuvre which oscillates between magic realism and social alienation sets up a context for Trouvé’s radical elaborations of space and time that in effect turn the viewers’ journey through space into less a physical than rather a psychological experience. Her Il Grande Ritratto concentrates on creating a space of blurred boundaries between the inside and the outside: by an almost delirious act of spatial reconfiguration, the artist deconstructs the space, saturating, condensing and “decelerating” it. The installation carries performative and participatory qualities: while walking through the space, the viewer morphs into the landscape which disrupts the autonomy of the museum’s space and imposes its own spatial and temporal grammar with small gardens of rocks and plants, a proliferation of columns that generate a different spatial rhythm, cables running through the air, surreal working spaces and bizarre automatic elevators… Trouvé’s is a sort of anti-space: an alternative environment where all regular spatial and temporal coordinates are either negated or suspended: the sculptures act as the prosthesis of the building and some objects are set in a state of levitation, partly stopped in their movements or challenged by the artist’s own treatment of scale and perspective. Il Grande Ritratto is, however, far from a portrait of chaos: on the contrary, it is an “image” of precision and formal unity that aims at generating a new and refreshing sense of space’s perception and comprehension.
Tatiana Trouvé (born 1968 in Cosenza, Italy, living and working in Paris) was awarded the prestigious Prix Ricard (2001) and Prix Marcel Duchamp (2007), and has participated in numerous exhibitions all over the world, including the Venice Biennale (2005), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2008), Manifesta7 (2008), and most recently, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2009).
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of events:
Tuesday, 23.02.2010/06:00 PM, Film Marathon “Into the Night”
Andrey Tarkovsky, “Mirror” (1974), “Stalker” (1979), “Nostalgia” (1983)
with an exclusive introduction by Andrey Tarkovsky’s son, Andrey A. Tarkovsky
Tuesday, 09.03.2010/07:00 PM, Lecture
Werner Helmich, “Science Fiction and Secrets. Dino Buzzati’s Novel, “Il Grande Ritratto””
Tuesday, 23.03.2010/06:00 PM , KIZ Royal Kino, Film Marathon “Into the Night”
Bela Tarr, “Damnation” (1987), “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000)
with an introduction by the director, Bela Tarr
Tuesday, 13.04.2010/06:00 PM, Film Marathon, “Into the Night”
Jean Cocteau, Orphic Trilogy (“The Blood of a Poet”, 1930, “Orphée”, 1950, “Testament of Orpheus”, 1959)
with an introduction by Adam Budak
Saturday, 17.04.2010/06:00 PM, Lectures
Pamela M. Lee (on Tatiana Trouvé’s Bureaucratic Imaginary)
Louise Neri (on Tatiana Trouvé’s Sculpting in Time)
The catalogue of Tatiana Trouvé’s exhibition “Il Grande Ritratto” includes essays by Tatiana Trouvé, Dino Buzzati, Maria Gough, Pamela M. Lee, Francesca Pietropaolo, Dieter Roelstraete and the exhibition’s curator, Adam Budak as well as a rich visual material and installation shots from Kunsthaus Graz exhibition.
The exhibition “Catch Me! Grasping Speed” curated by Katrin Bucher Trantow, is going to be open on the same evening, February 5th, 2010 featuring the works of Gwenaël Bélanger, Christian Eisenberger, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Daniel Hafner, Carsten Höller, Erika Giovanna Klien, Lu Qing, Aleksandra Mir, Lisi Raskin, Ludwig Reutterer, Wilhelm Rösler, Ed Ruscha, Anri Sala, Roman Signer, Xavier Veilhan, Stella Weissenberg, Markus Wilfling…
