Tania Mouraud

Tania Mouraud
Born	(1942-01-02) January 2, 1942 Paris, France
Nationality	French
Education	Autodidact
Known for	Video, photography, installation and sound performances
Awards	chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, chevalier de l'ordre national du Mérite, officier des Arts et des Lettres, officier de l'ordre national du Mérite

Tania Mouraud (born January 2, 1942, in Paris) is a contemporary French video artist and photographer.

Tania Mouraud began her artistic career at a young age as a painter. Later on, she shifted towards photography, continuously growing her portfolio. In the late 1990s, she created her first videos. Her work heavily features themes of anguish and responsibility, drawing from her personal mourning.

Mouraud's interest in videography eventually led to her to express her work through audial performances. She founded Unité de Production in 2002 for her sound performances, but embarked on live solo performances only after a few concerts with the group. She produced various video installations, including Ad Infinitum (2008), Ad Nauseam (2014), and a collaboration with the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).

In 2015, the exhibition: "Tania Mouraud. A Retrospective." was shown at the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

Early life

Tania Mouraud was born in Paris on January 2, 1942. She is the daughter of Martine Mouraud, journalist, publicist turned businesswoman, and writer. Her Romanian-born father, Marcel Mouraud, was a lawyer and collector of modern art. Both her parents were a part of the French Resistance.

She was exposed to art at an early age from her family's travels. She moved to England and then to Germany, where she discovered avant-garde art. Mouraud was influenced by various artists, including Zero, Beuys, John Cage, Gregory Corso, and John Coltrane, additionally befriending artists Gotthard Graubner and Reiner Ruthenbeck.

In the late 1960s, she lived in New York, where she met artist Dennis Oppenheim, bringing her into contact with the New York art scene.

Her first exhibition took place in 1966 at the Zunini gallery in Paris where she exhibited her peintures médicales (French for "medical paintings"), a notably intentionally unemotive collection of human drawings. She commented:

"If my painting is intentionally schematic it is because I want to escape the pathos in the search of precision. I like that which is clear. Feelings are dangerous; the object is defined, reassuring. If one day I decide to paint the human figure, it will be as an object."

In 1968, Tania Mouraud publicly burned all of her previous paintings.

Later work

Initiation Rooms

In 1968, Tania Mouraud created her first environments, called "Initiation Rooms". It is composed of glossy white spaces which combine to bring oneself toward introspection. Understanding the space in a psychosensory fashion creates perceptions of self-awareness. These environments are preceded musical performances by Pran Nath, Ann Riley and Terry Riley and La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.

Tania Mouraud considers that these spaces are like a room added to our apartments: "An extra space for an extra soul" says Pierre Restany. Tania Mouraud followed a mathematical logic curriculum at Paris 8 University, then leaving for India in Kerala for six years. She still spends six months a year there.

The Work of Art as an analytical proposition

In 1975, Tania Mouraud created in situ installations called "Art Spaces" in which short phrases, written on plastic construction sheeting the size of the wall, question the conditions of visual perception and lead the viewer to a vertiginous awareness from where he can see the depth of what he is doing.

Tania Mouraud continued this theme when she founded the group TRANS with Thierry Kuntzel then with Jon Gibson throughout the installations. Tania Mouraud then exhibited at PS1 in New York where she met Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham. That same year she began teaching at the Regional School of plastic expression in Tourcoing France.

During this period, she began her famous Wall Paintings which were huge black painted letters that were stretched, straight, and very close together to the point of almost being illegible. They form a word or sometimes a phrase, such as "I Have a Dream". In 1989, "WYSIWYG" (What you see is what you get) was exhibited at the BPI of the Centre Georges-Pompidou where "the first of the Wall Paintings of Tania Mouraud concealed the slogan of a well-known brand of computer beneath its lofty appearance".

While she displayed her Wall Paintings series within the art school where she teaches, Tania Mouraud transmitted her vision of the responsibility of the artist facing history: "With this exhibition, I hear students ask the same question I ask myself: what does it mean to be an artist in '92? In 1992, when there are three million people unemployed in a manner seemingly excluding them from society, and that we see the reappearance of the specter of racism? Then there was the phrase, "I have a dream" written in strongly elongated and somewhat illegible lettering, but there will always be someone to decipher them. I speak for that person. It's a secret. "

She exhibits in many art centers in France, England, Canada, and the United States.

Writings

Tania Mouraud has been working on the malleability and plasticity of writings since the 1960s. For her, it is a system of representation, with its highlights and invisibilities.

The Photo-texts (1971 - 1973), the Plastics (1972 - 1990), the Mandala (1972-1974) or the Kairos performance (1978) question perception, reading, the way in which language conceals reality and the limits of language.

This research continues with the Wallpaintings since 1989, which require a particular attention to be read, but also with the exploded writings (2012-2017).

In Tania Mouraud's work, we find a taste for a mutual translation of words and images. The Dream series (2005) exposes the quote "I have a dream", translated into 25 languages. It reflects the rapid shift that writing can make to drawing when it cannot be read. The writing becomes a line, a pictorial element.

It is the same with the counter-forms of the letters that the artist explores, in particular with City Performance n°1 (1977), the series of Words (1988), that of Black Continent (1990-1991), that of Black Power (1988-1992) and the piece Alea 718 (1989).

This last artwork uses a computer program to establish a unique composition, which the artist wants to free from patriarchal pictorial canons thanks to the element of chance allowed by the process. This taste for programming is also put to work with the Mots-Mêlés (2017-2021), which hide poems or opera excerpts behind black flat tints.

Her artist's books, as FlashS' (2020), confirm this work of the word and the sign as plastic manifestations.

Photography

In the mid-1980s, a number of photographic series began to emerge, such as Made in Palace, which comprised black and white photos taken during "gay parties" at a Parisian club, showcasing the turbulent and multisensory spaces through blurry images. The artist saw a connection between painting and photography. Other series were created until 1992, featuring pictures of kitsch objects in different locations.

In 2008, Tania Mouraud continued to explore photographic painting with her new series, "Borderland", which reflected on the landscapes of "round balers" of straw. She also created the Rubato series, capturing the rubber tree plantations in Kerala and the Désastre series, which focused on the gaps in forests created by deforestation. Additionally, the Balafres series showcased quarries in Germany.

Videos and Installations

For the artist, the practice of "the sequential image" has long been set aside but it was during the 1990s that Tania Mouraud gradually became interested in video. "I have become accustomed to walking with a camcorder and, little by little, the idea has emerged." It was the 2000s that marked a turning point for the artist where video became an important part of her work.

Among the main creations:

• "Sightseeing" 2002. A foggy winter landscape, shot through a misty window, unfolds before our eyes, escorted by the incisive air of a klezmer clarinet. For seven minutes the road is an anguished climb to a stop, where finally, in front, a path firmly leads our gaze to a place where we will not approach. We then see that it is the concentration camp Natzweiler-Struthof, in Alsace. "The memory then falsely induces us to the illusion of a train journey, while signs of a car trip are present in the image. "
• "La Curée", 2003. Hunting dogs slowly and sensually devour raw meat. "This film is an ode to life. It is an image of violence, but in reality, when you look, it is the skin, the hair, it is a choreography of the body ... The dogs are happy because this is their reward. They do not seem mean. This is perhaps the violence of eroticism ... "
• "Le verger", 2003. Images of flowers in vibrant colors alternate with images of war at a pace difficult to follow and in a heavy and metallic air, punctuated by harrowing cries. Le Verger was immediately exhibited at the Fonds régional d'art contemporain (Frac) in Lower Normandy.
• "La Fabrique", 2006. Video installations, filmed in India, which will be exhibited in several cities in France including the Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain (Fiac) curated by the Dominique Fiat gallery, and also in California, Canada and finally in St. Petersburg. "The faces of 108 male and female workers on multiple monitors and the deafening sound of working looms create in the visitor a sensation of mechanical work. The dislocated bodies of these workers are the engine of this strange fabric ..."
• "Roaming", 2009. Video installation on display at the musée de la chasse et de la nature in Paris.

In 2008, a press release for the opening of Roaming, Borderland we read that this creation "is considered a testimony of her exceptional mastery of the art of video. Shot in black and white, the dark undergrowth of images and watchtowers are reworked and almost become abstract, and then are accompanied by an acoustic creation that accentuates their dramatic character. Captured at twilight and magnified by the work of the artist, these pieces of nature become metaphors for the human condition, violence, loneliness and death ".

• "Ad Infinitum" 2009. Huge video installation in the chapel of the oratory of Nantes. Projected inside the chapel, the filmed whales almost appear and disappear into a dark and cloudy water. For Tania Mouraud, "The whole piece evokes the plea of the living, the groaning of nature that begs us to stop the ecological carnage as well as the moans of our inner child as we face the unknown, the loss of communication and of love. " "The sequence of Ad Infinitum is a choreography"
• "Once upon a time", 2012. Gigantic projection on the City Hall of Toronto during the Nuit Blanche in 2012. "Once Upon a Time shows the mechanistic universe attacking the living, and we sense, at the moment the saw cuts into the tree, that the saw enters our own body."
• "Ad Nauseam" 2014. Huge video triptych at the Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne. | Projected in a huge room, three side-by-side videos show a book recycling plant. Videos are devoid of any human presence, we see a series of machines that pile and then grind thousands of books. The installation is accompanied by a sound creation by Tania Mouraud done in collaboration with IRCAM. A random droning sound taken from the sounds of grinding machines is constantly played.

Sound and Sound Performances

In 2002, Tania Mouraud founded the musical experimentation group " Unité de Production " with Christian Atabekian, Ruben Garcia, Pierre Petit, Cyprien Quairiat, Marie-Odile Sambourg, Sylvain Souque and Baptiste Vandeweydeveldt.

Then it follows a musical course via the Internet at the Berklee College of Music. Since J.I.T. in Brest (2008), she performed live solo improvisations accompanying her videos at the Béton Salon in Paris, and during the same year at the Centre d'art passerelle in Brest, musée de la chasse et de la nature in Paris and at the Lieu unique in Nantes, during the Nuit Blanche 2012 at Gare d'Austerlitz as well as the Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (Mac/Val) during her exhibition of Ad Nauseam in 2014.

A Social Art

In 1977, Tania Mouraud organized her first "City performance": 54 4x3 meter billboards on which the word "NI" is written and posted in several Parisian arrondissements. "Absolute negation, a denial, all the more disturbing, when it does not say what it is targeting. This seems to be resistance to the usual forms of advertising discourse, and the market sphere in whose service it is placed" writes Arnauld Pierre.

In 1993, Tania Mouraud directed "Apartment 374", an ongoing intervention in an apartment of the l'Unité d'habitation by Le Corbusier in Firminy. The codified signs of nomads are sandblasted onto the windows of the living room, turning it into a "welcoming home". For the duration of the exhibition, croissants were distributed free to the public.

In 1996, she scattered 4000 small medals marked with the word love on the streets of New York, at the Fondation Cartier and at the Mirabelle Festival in Metz.

That same year, she exhibited Le Silence des héros for the Occupied Territories exhibition in Zweibrücken, Germany. Along the walls of the room, red and black flags are rolled up and placed against the wall.

Writings on Tania Mouraud

Monographs

• 2022, [Dire], catalogue, LABF15, Lyon, Perrine Lacroix, Cécile Renoult
• 2019, Tania Mouraud, Ecriture(s), catalogue, Le Hangar 107, Rouen, Nicolas Couturieux, Mathias Barthel, Cécile Renoult
• 2018, Tania Mouraud, Everything must have an ending except my love for you, catalogue, Tauves, Perrine Le Querrec
• 2017, Tania Mouraud, Who's the enemy ?, catalogue, La Mouche, lieu d’art contemporain, Béziers, France.
• 2016, OTNOT, Eastwards Prospectus, text by Elodie Stroecken, Bucharest, Romania
• 2016, TANIA MOURAUD, Eastwards Prospectus
• 2016, Everyday ogres at Visual Arts Centre - The University of Texas at Austin, USA
• 2015, Tania Mouraud, Une Rétrospective, catalogue, Centre Pompidou-Metz
• 2014, Tania Mouraud, Ad Nauseam, catalogue, Mac/Val
• 2014, Tania Mouraud, exhausted laughters, catalogue, musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne
• 2004, Tania Mouraud, textes de Arnauld Pierre, Éditions Flammarion

External links

• Official website
• Tania Mouraud. A Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou-Metz
• Ad-Nauseam at the Mac/Val
• Modern Art Museum of Saint-Etienne
• Slought Foundation
• LeMonde
• ArtDaily website