As part of the cultural season of France and Israel 2018, the Petach Tikva Museum of Art presents “The Great Atlas of Disorientation,” by artist Tatiana Trouve.
Born in Italy, but living and working in Paris, Tatiana Trouve has exhibited in various solo shows around the world, ranging from the Red Brick Beijing to the Pompidou Center in Paris and Central Park in New York. She has won several awards and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Biennale in Lyon, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and more.
In her new solo exhibit at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, spanning two main exhibition halls of the museum, the first space contains "The Great Atlas of Disorientation," and inhabits a series of sculptural objects. It is a seemingly kind of temporary shelter, made of cast bronze, aluminum and copper, cast on the basis of cardboard. Affixed to the sides of these structures are old diaries, various objects (a soap bar, a compass, and so forth). Logs are displayed alongside older objects and other materials.
© ELAD SARIG PHOTOGRAPHY
The works are of cast-iron sculptures, drowned in symbols, formulas, and various maps, navigational maps – some national and some celestial maps – elements that relate to a variety of times and cultures. Various cracked objects are scattered in this land, due to the passage of time. The purposeful disquiet of the space also intuits a sense of implicit danger that arises both from one’s awareness of the geological movement of the Earth, and from the care that the viewer is required to exercise while moving through this post-apocalyptic sphere. The other display, "Prepared Space," includes a large navigation map over the entire space.
The first notions that come to mind when thinking of Tatiana Trouve's oeuvre are extreme delicacy, restrained violence, and an overwhelming sense of ephemerality. In her work, Trouve investigates the relations between time and space through the creation of enigmatic environments that rely on logical, architectural, and material disruptions. The various spaces created in these works contain the concept of time in different ways – spatially, sembiotically, and poetically, as if attempting to map what has vanished and no longer exists. These spaces could be said to constitute containers of memory.
The two large-scale installations are each site specific in their own way. The maps and signs, which refer to a wide range of time periods and cultures. Above all, they raise questions concerning perspective, time, and memory. The transition to the interior space, which features the work "Prepared Space", amplifies the sense of immersion within the work. The entirely white space is marked by various trajectories, long slits into which spacers, borrowed from the world of architecture and construction. Disorientation, seems to have expanded throughout the space, covering the floor and walls.
© Elad Sarig
“The Great Atlas of Disorientation” offers a system for the cartographical mapping of what cannot be mapped, cannot be ordered. Thus, the tension between knowing and not knowing, between existence and potential, runs through these works as it does through Trouve's overarching artistic strategy.