Tatiana Trouvé (born 1968 in Cosenza, lives and works in Paris) became known for her room constructions, architectonic interventions, and snake-like metal sculptural objects that are seemingly solidified in movement – as if frozen. In her artworks Tatania Trouvé often explores the association between the “inner” and the “outer” on both material and psychological levels. Psychological spaces are turned outwards and become concrete, uncanny “inner” spaces. For this, her first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Tatiana Trouvé is exhibiting an installative spatial structure with architectonic interventions and large format drawings.

As the exhibition title suggests, Tatiana Trouvé persistently attempts to structure connections between “inner” and “outer” afresh, to create a new transition in the exhibition space, in which mental and physical space correlate with one another to form a new reality. For each of her exhibitions, Trouvé uses the specific architecture of the exhibition site, where she carries out extremely precise interventions that interfere with its “cycle”, reconstructing and refiguring it. Thus, the space at the foremost part of the museum becomes an installation composed of various points; a mesh of copper filaments placed directly into the floor and in the walls, leading to a perspex monolith, which is placed in the room vertically. The installative arrangement can read as a “redirection” of energies with set-off from the space. Opposite this is an area with numerous pendulums that have been brought to a standstill, each of which has been sent in a different direction by an invisible magnetic field. The pendulum, an instrument frequently used in research about magnetic fields and often lending a space the character of a living organism, here takes on an uncanny, mysterious character. In the antithesis of the rhythmic time-defined beat of the metronome, the organizm “space” appears to have been cast into an artificial, deep slumber. Thus Tatiana Trouvé thematises Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “unHEIMlich” (often translated into English as ‘uncanny’ but the German literally means “not like home” or “unfamiliar” thus strange, alien or uncanny and relates, in Freud’s famous essay, to his use of the etymology of “unheimlich” and its return in the German language to Heim – home, the familiar) nominated in a space where the “Heim” (home) suddenly becomes a place of unease.

Also to be read in this context, are Tatiana Trouvé’s two dimensional works – collages and large-scale drawings, some of which are applied directly onto the wall. One such wall work also determines the second part of the exhibition. At first glance, the drawings appear like classical-perspectival architectural sketches, but upon more precise scrutiny they continually veer from their perspectival vanishing lines, rendering their inner architecture nebulous. In her work Tatania Trouvé persistently attempts to visualise anew, from the “unconscious”, conditions that are constantly affected by uncertainty; her module-charged “mental landscapes” circle around themes such as living space, memory, architecture and the construction of reality.

Works by Tatiana Trouvé have most recently been seen (amongst others) at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (solo exhibition, 2008), at FRAC Lorraine (solo exhibition, 2008), and at Manifesta 7 (2008).


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