Tania Mouraud – Why do the hills cry?

Why do hills cry?

From Tania Mouraud, we know the writings deployed on the scale of architecture, the grandiose landscapes and the striking videos. For the very first time, she presents us in the exhibition Why do the hills cry? Hand-drawn drawings and intimate formats, which invite us to get closer. In the continuity of his research on the plasticity of writing, the letters are mixed and entangled in the Pasik series (2024). The poem, from a Yiddish source, blurs like a tearful gaze. Illegible, it expresses beyond words the sadness felt by humanity in the face of wars that never cease to be repeated. The insistence of the gesture evokes a deletion, that of the perpetual rewriting of the same story, to the point of saturation or obliteration. Unless it was the burnt tapes that fell from a projector, which would have played the same film over and over again. The hills evoked by the title of the exhibition can be glimpsed almost along the shaded outline of a sign, drawing the volume of a body of letters immediately drowned among its peers. In the next room, it is in a mirror that a quote from Gandhi shatters. “Should I go on forever ?”. The question is rhetorical as much about the Indian political personality as Tania Mouraud, for whom the struggle is not a choice: it will last as long as necessary, even if it is eternal. Further on, the paper draws embossed letters in relief, all dressed in white, (Embossing, since 2023). Arranged next to each other, they draw movements or architectures. Between the hollows and the contours of the letters, the gaze is lost. Sign and surface mingle. One proceeds from the other. They are one and are never separated. This form, never detached from what surrounds him, is reminiscent of the artist’s positioning within his Initiation Rooms, or even in his work as a whole: his installations, as well as his series of photographs or his videos, are based on the presupposition that we are part of a whole. Isn’t believing oneself separate from the world the greatest risk, since then the world belongs to us when it is we who belong to the world? The plasticized straw bales of the Borderland series (2007-2010) reflect the surrounding countryside, like an eye reflects what it is looking at. Here again, the surface and the object represented are one and the same. On this plastic material that pollutes the world from its highest peaks to its deepest abysses, a landscape as if painted in oil, which borders on abstraction, unfolds. Similarly, it is our own reflection that we encounter when we contemplate the Mots-Mêlés (2018), these excerpts from poems and operas transformed into geometric spaces and painted on sheet metal. Landscapes and letters respond to each other. The dark space, saturated with signs of DERTSEYLN 9478 (Canvas series, 2021) is reminiscent of the swamps of Film Noir (2011-2021). The Shmues series (2020), where letters cut through space, echoes Hybridations (2008-2019) where white lines are cut out in negative.

Tania Mouraud succeeds in constantly reinventing herself while inviting us into a coherent universe. His recent works dialogue with older pieces, both formally and through the echo of a common philosophy. Cécile Renoult – 2024