Tania Mouraud — Ad Nauseam — MAC VAL Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 20, 2014 → January 25, 2015

To start the fall season, MAC/VAL presents “AD NAUSEAM”, a solo exhibition of Tania Mouraud, a major figure in french contemporary art. Her art used to question mostly human conditions. This exhibition will include a 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 visitors with one of the artist’s main themes, Man’s destruction of his own history, recalled 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 thoughts. Like a paintbrush on canvas, Tania Mouraud uses her 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 multilayered 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 system directed by Tania Mouraud during her residence at Ircam from 2013 to 2014. This project emphasizes the aggressive nature of machines related destructive nature of Mankind. It’s irreversible actions that are still repeated despite the lessons which were taught.

Tania Mouraud, Ad nauseam, 2012-2014 Installation vidéo et son, 3 écrans, 27 enceintes — 72’ (en boucle) Co-production MAC/VAL — Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne et l’Ircam-Centre Pompidou — © Adagp, Paris 2014.

This assembly of 1500 samples of mechanical, industrial sounds empower the violence of the machine, creating the sonorous equivalent of its visual dynamic. Sound, used as a weapon, draws visitors into the image; just as the image attract them into the sound. With this video triptych nearly 35 meters long and 7 meters high and a sound system 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 works for the outside of the museum, extending her writing process in a public space. For over twenty years, she has created abstract paintings in which she inscribes sentences 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 sentences 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.

Tania Mouraud, Cqnpsrlpscalr, 2014 Impression numérique sur bâche tendue — 5,05 × 43,68 m MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine. Production MAC/VAL — Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Photo © Marc Domage, mise en situation Amandine Mineo — © Adagp, Paris 2014

Mouraud will take over the lateral facade of the museum, some forty meters long, with the phrase CEUXQUINEPEUVENTSERAPPELERLEPASSESONTCONDAMNESALEREPETER (THOSEWHOCANNOTREMEMBERTHEPASTARECONDEMNEDTOREPEAT IT). This sentence reminds Mankind of its lack of self-criticism facing History. It recalls the museum installation AD NAUSEAM and provides new interpretations about people’s engagement in society, nowadays. Another work, placed on the museum facade, takes up the expression MEMEPASPEUR (NOTEVENAFRAID) which is also reproduced on the admission tickets.

Tania Mouraud, Mpp, 2014 Impression numérique sur bâche tendue — 5 × 5 m Production MAC/VAL — Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Photo © Marc Domage, mise en situation Amandine Mineo — © Adagp, Paris 2014

In addition, following in the footsteps of her work in Quimper in 1996, Tania Mouraud will occupy more than seventy billboards in Vitry-sur-Seine as part of the festival “Murs/Murs” (“walls/walls”).¹ For this ephemeral act within the urban landscape, she will inscribe Martin Luther King’s famous IHAVEDREAM in the heart of the city. By taking over spaces reserved for advertising, Mouraud blurs the our codes of communication and, as always, places the spectator, the passer-by, in a state of questioning before the indecipherable, calling upon them to pause and take their time. It is as though she is reminding us that art can — to this day — be an act of collective resistance.

¹ Mur/Murs — Week dedicated to urban culture in Vitry-sur-Seine from 3 to 12 October 2014.