Tania Mouraud – Why do the hills cry?

Why do hills cry?

We are familiar with Tania Mouraud’s writing on the scale of architecture, grandiose landscapes and striking videos. For the very first time, in the exhibition Why do the hills cry? hand drawings and intimate formats that invite us to come closer.

Continuing his research into the plasticity of writing, letters intermingle and tangle in the Pasik (2024) series. The poem, from a Yiddish source, blurs like a tear-fogged gaze. Unreadable, it expresses beyond words the sadness felt by humanity in the face of wars that keep repeating themselves. The insistence of the gesture evokes an erasure, the perpetual rewriting of the same story, to the point of saturation or obliteration. The hills evoked by the exhibition’s title can almost be made out along the shaded outline of a sign, outlining the volume of a letter body that is immediately drowned among its fellows. In the next piece, a quotation from Gandhi crashes into a mirror. “Should I go on forever? The question is a rhetorical one for both the Indian politician and Tania Mouraud, for whom the struggle is not a choice: it will last as long as necessary, even if that means forever.

Further on, the paper is embossed with white letters (Gaufrages, since 2023). Arranged side by side, they create movements or architectures. Between the hollows and contours of the letters, the eye is lost. Sign and surface merge. One proceeds from the other. They are one and never separate. This form, never detached from its surroundings, is reminiscent of the artist’s positioning within his Initiation Rooms, and indeed in his work as a whole: his installations, photographic series and videos are based on the presupposition that we are part of a whole. Isn’t the greatest risk of all, to believe that we’re separate from the world, because then the world belongs to us, whereas it’s we who belong to the world?

The plasticized straw bales in the Borderland series (2007-2010) reflect the surrounding countryside, just as the eye reflects what it is looking at. Here again, surface and represented object become one. On this plastic material that pollutes the world from its highest peaks to its deepest abysses, a landscape unfolds as if painted in oils, verging on abstraction. Similarly, it’s our own reflection that we encounter when we contemplate Mots-Mêlés (2018), extracts from poems and operas transformed into geometric spaces and painted on sheet metal.

Landscapes and letters respond to each other. The dark, sign-saturated space of DERTSEYLN 9478 (Canvas series, 2021) recalls the swamps of Film Noir (2011-2021). The Shmues series (2020), in which letters slice through space, echoes the Hybridations (2008-2019), in which white lines are cut in negative. Tania Mouraud succeeds in constantly reinventing herself while inviting us into a coherent universe. His recent works interact with older pieces, both formally and through the echo of a shared philosophy.

Cécile Renoult – 2024