JEVNAKER.- Kistefos Museum unveiled Tatiana Trouvé, the acclaimed French-Italian artist, as Sculptor of the Year for 2024. Born in Italy in 1968, Trouvé brings her unique vision to life in two captivating sculptures, The Guardian and Bench, specially crafted for the museum's season opening on May 4th. These remarkable pieces find their home within the historic Wood Pulp Mill, enriching the site with layers of history, reflection, and homage.
Tatiana Trouvé has created two unique, site-specific sculptures for Kistefos as part of her Guardian series (2013-). The Guardians are not portraits of people, but hollowed, imaginary portraits of individuals, or rather ghosts, who defend or guard worlds, places, and forms of existence. The Guardians protect ideas and are associated with political, ecological, anthropological, and historical challenges. But above all, they protect other artworks – they are made to exist among, and in dialogue with other works, and therefore take the place of a true museum guard.
The Guardian and Bench will be permanent additions to the museum collection. Trouvé has drawn inspiration from the surroundings, history, and humans who shape Kistefos, painstakingly composing her sculptural objects as memories of what was, and guardians of what is. The Guardian, a dreamlike presence that has softly shaped the seats and cushions and whose return may be imminent, is there to protect the spirit of Kistefos’ generations past. The essence of Kistefos is encapsulated in the sculptures, inviting contemplation and reflection. The works allude to the workers’ community which was a defining feature of Kistefos until the mid-1950s, while also mirroring distinctively Norwegian values and ruminating on the universal human experience.
The Guardian takes its shape from a chair by Kaare Klint, a Danish architect and furniture designer whose designs became popular in Scandinavia in the early 1900s. Partly covered by a marble pillow is a book by Anna Caspari Agerholt, one of the first champions of women’s rights in Norway, and the first woman with a university degree to write comprehensively on the subject. Flowers and plants from Kistefos are neatly placed behind the cushion. A badge, composed like an abstract painting but based on polaroids of wood fibers from Kistefos, is barely visible underneath a blue cardigan.
Bench is Trouvé’s first Guardian in the form of a bench. Inspired by the wood pulp produced at Kistefos until 1955, it is seemingly covered in cardboard. Other objects placed on the bench include a pillow, a jacket, an image of paper fibers, a crushed soda can, and two books: Life’s Philosophy by Arne Næss and On Talking Terms with Dogs by Turid Rugaas. The Norwegian philosopher and explorer Arne Næss’ thoughts on ecology and pedagogy question fundamental notions of knowledge and have influenced thinkers and philosophers worldwide. In her book, Turid Rugaas advocates for natural ways of bonding between dogs and humans.
Both sculptures are created in solid materials such as marble, bronze, brass, sodalite and aluminium. Trouvé is concerned with using materials that already exist to create her sculptures, and has therefore used marble exclusively found in desacralized churches and tombstones in Italy.
The two works serve as repository for reflection and memory, executed with affection and diligence in every fine detail from the precious, rare stone to the exquisite painting of paper fibers, worn marks on the leather chair and detailed painting of the cardboard’s signs of wear and use. The choice of books and objects describes the artist’s many impressions from Kistefos, its history and place in the larger history of Norway.
Tatiana Trouvé assesses the relationship between memory and material, exploring our worldview beyond the human perspective. In her large-scale drawings, cast and carved sculptures, and site-specific installations, Trouvé assesses the relationship between memory and material, pitting the ceaseless flow of time against the remarkable endurance of common objects. She has been revitalising sculpture and installation since the mid-1990s.
Trouvé was born in Cosenza, Italy, and spent her childhood and early teenage years in Dakar, Senegal. After graduating from the Villa Arson, Nice, France, in 1989, she moved to the Netherlands to the Ateliers 63 in Haarlem for two years. In 1994, she moved to Paris, eventually establishing her studio in Montreuil, a historically industrial suburb on the eastern periphery of the city. In 1997, while searching for a job, she began the project Bureau d’activités implicites (Bureau of Implicit Activities) (1997–2007), in which she displayed her personal documents in architectural “modules,” interspersing them with invented résumés and other fictionalized papers. This experiment in crafting and comprehending identity through a bureaucratic lens, a foundation for Trouvé’s archival impulse, allowed her to accumulate a vast collection of images and small objects that are referenced in her drawings and sculptures.
In the sculptural series Polders (2000–), Trouvé scales up objects and interiors, yet often implements windows or mirrors that prevent the viewer from getting physically into the spaces. Thus, while accumulated documents reveal the fictions of identity formation in Bureau d’activités implicites, in Polders, physical limitations alienate the mind and body from seemingly familiar interiors.
Trouvé’s drawings have always been deeply intertwined with her sculptural work. Often, she projects visual fragments from the studio or from her personal archive of found and original images onto the picture plane, capturing them there in graphite to create richly detailed two-dimensional realms. In the series Intranquillity (2005–), whose title refers to Fernando Pessoa’s 1982 Book of Disquiet (Intranquillité in the French translation), Trouvé experiments with different modes of spatiotemporal shifting. The works comprising the series Remanence (Afterglow) (2008–), drawn in black graphite on black paper, reveal the surprises and the inconsistencies of memory, considering the liminal space between waking and dreaming. A similar relationship exists between the series Les dessouvenus (The unremembered) (2013–) and The Great Atlas of Disorientation (2019–). To make the former, Trouvé plunges large sheets of colored paper into bleach, allowing the boundaries of each stain to provide a loose structure for complex “environmental dramas” that she then draws in pencil. To create the latter, she uses watercolor, ink, or linseed oil to defamiliarize the compositional structures of Les dessouvenus.
Trouvé was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2007, which led to 4 between 3 and 2, a 2008 solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris, featuring drawings, cast-bronze sculptures, and architectural barriers made of metal bars and glass. In 2010, the Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, presented Il grande ritratto (Larger than Life), a monumental installation wherein Trouvé transformed the museum’s lower level into a postapocalyptic landscape echoing the 1960 science-fiction novel of the same title by Italian writer Dino Buzzati. That same year, the survey Tatiana Trouvé: The Longest Echo / L’écho le plus long opened at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva. The structure of many of Trouvé’s exhibitions is echoed in the ongoing series Les indéfinis (The undefined) (2014–), which combines and reactivates works that were initially intended for past series but ended up taking on separate lives of their own. Common objects—tires, folded cardboard, macramé hangings—are cast in bronze or copper and paired with vitrines of gleaming greenish Plexiglas. As their collective title suggests, Les indéfinis resist definition, existing between the categories of Trouvé’s practice.
In 2015, the Public Art Fund commissioned Trouvé to create Desire Lines, an outdoor installation in New York’s Central Park consisting of oversize spools of rope whose respective lengths correspond with those of more than two hundred distinct pathways in the park. This tactile approach to cartography, suggesting that maps emerge from and alter bodily experience, appears in various iterations in Trouvé’s work.
More than orientation, however, Trouvé reveals the infinite potentialities of disorientation, encouraging viewers to wander, even to get lost. She continues to merge interior and exterior worlds, more explicitly taking on ecological questions by considering the ways in which public and private space, built and destroyed environments, converge.
