CHAUMONT-SUR-LOIRE.- The five series exhibited by Tania Mouraud at the
Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire bring us face to face with the fragile beauty of the world. The titles Borderland, Balafres, Desolation Row, Nostalgia and Film Noir (unpublished) indicate that, while the experience of these images is one of wonder, that is not the end of the story. For Tania Mouraud, the work exhibited is confessional and an invitation to the viewer. For those who accept it and dive into the space opened up by the photographer, there is something underneath the beautiful interplay of tones and shapes which fights back from within. Sometimes this occurs at first glance, as in the apocalyptically graceful landscape of Desolation Row. Sometimes, it takes a child’s patience to probe the image and to unravel what is going on in the apparent calm. From a quasi-painting created using the ‘temptation’ of abstract art, the photograph becomes an uncompromising mirror on our world. The ravages of industrial agriculture, of mining and the wounds inflicted by man on nature burst into view.
In Borderland (2007-2010), close-up views of tarpaulins covering bales of straw are transformed by the light into canvases reflecting the jumble of the surrounding nature, sky and earth. These images bring to mind Monet’s Haystacks and the atmospheric landscapes of Constable and Turner. In terms of art, they occupy the border or borderland between abstract and figurative art.
Viewed together with Desolation Row (2018), ‘border’ also has another meaning. A far cry from any cliché of a rural idyll, fields of rotting haystacks are depicted, creating high, blackened towers reaching to the sky and leaning so far over that you expect to see them “Fall with a funereal rumble”, as described in the Chant d’automne (Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857). What the artist has seen raises questions. What place does our society give to an essential activity, but one which is marginal to the lives of most people? What is left of an activity when it has been pushed to excess and no longer provides just essential food? The theme of decay, in a similar way to a memento mori, becomes an invitation not to look away from what is disturbing. For the artist, “Being a citizen means living with your eyes open to the world.” From the desolation may then arise a revelation in the etymological sense of Apocalypse to which Desolation Row refers. However, this is not a universal epiphany but more an awareness of our limits - yet another meaning of border.
Balafres (2014) documents the irreversible impact on the landscape of lignite mining (a coal used for heating and electricity generation) in three open-cast mines in Inden, Garzweiler and Hambach in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Although an artificial lake is planned to cover the Hambach mine when it closes in 2045, the title emphasises the irreversible violence inflicted on the site. At 293 metres below sea level, Hambach is one of the deepest open-cast mines, and its expansion eats away at the forest which bears the same name. The artist was unable to go unnoticed with the equipment needed to take images of such quality, so, in order not to arouse attention, she increased her vantage points, varying the viewing angles of the mines and making their immensity all the more apparent.
The main focus of the Nostalgia series (2019) is a sense of vastness and of snow covering everything as far as the eye can see. Shot in the Nizhny Novgorod region, which is a major industrial centre for automotives, military aeronautics and energy in Russia, the series reveals almost nothing of this frenetic activity, except for the vertical lines of pylons mixed in with the trees which can only be picked out if you look very closely at the horizon. This is just like the spears (but human this time) bristling on the horizon in the final scene of Eisenstein’s film Alexandre Nevski (1938), whose spectacular visual style “Made a strong impression” on the artist.
Tania Mouraud talks about the “Beauty of evil” in relation to sights such as the Balafres mines and the Desolation Row haystacks. In the latter, the tottering silhouettes of the bales create a striking setting which is sharpened by the desaturation of the image. In the former, excavation of the earth reveals a visible strata of pure colours - ochres and greys which look as if they have been painted onto a canvas. Echoing the photographer’s own contradictory experience of her subjects, we are both dazzled viewers and horrified witnesses. It is perhaps, however, this confusion caused by experiencing beautiful images of disasters which will trigger us into action. We are deprived of the calm of indifference by allowing our emotions to become involved. What have we done to the beauty of the world, what do we want to do about it? These questions are addressed to everyone in a sensitive way. This is in a similar way to a prayer, such as the one expressed in the artist’s latest Wall Paintings, ‘Ne faites point de mal à la terre’ (Do not harm the earth).
Mouraud gleans bits and pieces of answers to the questions which beset us as we tread the fine line between “The wonder of life” and “The horror of the world” from what she has listened to or read. This is the case with the saying “From chaos to art” taken from Leonard Cohen’s poem ‘The Book of Longing’, or the phrase “To shout forever until the end of the world” taken from the writer Benjamin Fondane. “We are night watchmen in the face of unbridled globalisation and disorderly development,” she adds. She looks, shows and has a way of observing and cataloguing which, despite the bleakness of the wounds inflicted on the world and by virtue of the beauty of which the world still remains capable, gives reason to hope.
When the world ends
Tania Mouraud’s photographs listen to the world and show its transformations - both the silent changes and the more overpowering ones. Her photographs are a sensitive and absorbent medium, which the artist works at and shapes by borrowing from the concepts of painting, engraving and drawing. Nature damaged by human intervention has been depicted on photographic paper or by the artist’s digital camera since the 1960s. Seemingly deserted landscapes stand out by what disfigures them.
The Arbres series has stood the test of time. First photographed in 1975, they were digitally reworked in 2020 and the grain enhanced, which has given them an altered, eroded appearance. The image appears to blur and be on the verge of disappearing.
The Borderland series, created between 2007 and 2010, depicts the reflection of a landscape which has become abstract and fragmented in the plastic surrounding bales of straw. The colours, which have been stretched, resemble those of oil paints blended across the surface of a canvas. The Désastres series (2014) is populated by a disturbing forest portrayed in a negative format. The space is saturated and the horizon has disappeared. The trees have a ghost-like appearance. They are a reminder of those trees torn down by voracious diggers on behalf of the timber industry in the video Once upon a time (2011-2012).
The Balafres series emerged in 2014. In the lignite basins of Germany, bulldozers dig into the earth, leaving behind evidence of their activity and uncovering strata of colour which look like wounds. Our gaze plunges into an artificial landscape and takes in what at first glance appears to be a painting of imagined places. The composition is reminiscent of the backgrounds of Renaissance works of art. The aesthetic appeal evokes the sublime which was so dear to the Romantics. However, Tania Mouraud’s sublime raises the spectre of sensations which are more melancholic than enthralled.
The Desolation Row series (2018) has the appearance of ruins under a brooding sky. Dark hay is piled up, wet and spoiled, shaped by human hands and then abandoned. They are a far cry from Monet’s colourful Haystacks. These bales tell the tale of a different end to summer - one that heralds the returning cold and autumn, with all the slow disintegration of nature that that brings before it is in turn reborn.
In 2019, Tania Mouraud photographed the snow-filled, untouched landscape of Nijni Novgorod in Russia. Here, the impact made by humans is silent and allows space for the muted emergence of bare and distant trees (Nostalgia).
They create a line or make a horizon reappear, like a mirage tracing the contours of a community who might be watching us Vegetation grows, unstoppable, through the thick layer of snow (Émergences). Life appears where it is not expected. Tania Mouraud’s photographs, like her videos, performances and written work, are imbued with a gentle melancholy. They are a nod to people who are missing, rubbed out by history, or to languages battered by inhumanity and to heart-rending songs. They also highlight the courage of those who resist destruction. In this way, the landscapes depicted by the artist take on the appearance of portraits and eventually become mirrors. They embody us, surround us and embrace us. In the Siberia anthology, written by the poet Avrom Sutzkever, a child asks his father “Tell me, where does the world end, O father?”
Tania Mouraud’s gaze, from the destruction it observes to the vistas it composes, seems driven by similar concerns and invites us in to share them.
--Cécile Renoult, 2021
