Tatiana Trouve

A sculptural and architectural “double bind” that disturbs our logic of perception

In a structure covering a surface area of approximately 500 sq. m., Tatiana Trouvé’s installation Double Bind brings together a composite collection of sculptures – rocks covered with padlocks and copper weights, landscapes made from salt, spaces consisting of “black boxes”, hybrid objects – playing on discrepancies and repetitions that conjure up the way memory fragments and flicks through space and time. She gradually establishes a “contradictory” path, offering visitors a destabilising experience, like a sort of “double bind”. The “double bind”, a concept that comes from communication theories, is a paradoxical double injunction that plunges the subject into a state of mental block, or even physical paralysis. Thus Tatiana Trouvé creates a universe determined by the repetition and displacement of reference points, a world within which each object gives a temporal dimension to space. Viewers of the work are seemingly led to make a choice, but first and foremost they are constrained to invent new systems for finding their bearings. Double Bind is an installation that offers many potential routes and disturbs our logic of perception. Following Polders in 2002 and her participation in the exhibition Notre histoire… in 2006, this is the third time Tatiana Trouvé’s work has been presented at the Palais de Tokyo, and she confronts visitors with a sculptural and architectural construct of staggering dimensions.

Constituting spaces conducive to the development of psychological phenomena and their deployment in time has been central to the work of Tatiana Trouvé ever since she created the Bureau d’Activités Implicites (B.A.I.) (Office of Implicit Activities) in 1997. The B.A.I. is composed of Modules and Polders. The former are places of work and concentration: we do not quite know if their function is to identify or produce thoughts, or if they contain the traces of the artist’s activity, as if the genesis of the work also constituted its horizon. The latter are reduced-size spaces, enigmatic because they are composed of elements referring to heterogeneous universes: their changes in scale are systematically accompanied by the redefinition of a logic of space bearing all the marks of an oneiric experience.

Tatiana Trouvé has contributed to various collective exhibitions such as Clandestins at the Venice Biennale (2003), Configurations/Modèles modèles at the MAMCO in Geneva (2005) and Printemps de septembre in Toulouse (2006). In addition she has had several solo exhibitions, including the CAPC in Bordeaux. She is currently preparing two major solo exhibitions to be held in 2007 at the MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine and the Villa Arson in Nice.

Tatiana Trouve
Double Bind