Tania Mouraud (born January 2, 1942, in Paris) is a contemporary French video artist and photographer.
Tania Mouraud began her artistic career at a young age as a painter. Later on, she shifted towards photography, continuously growing her portfolio. In the late 1990s, she created her first videos. Her work heavily features themes of anguish and responsibility, drawing from her personal mourning.
Mouraud's interest in videography eventually led to her to express her work through audial performances. She founded Unité de Production in 2002 for her sound performances, but embarked on live solo performances only after a few concerts with the group. She produced various video installations, including Ad Infinitum (2008), Ad Nauseam (2014), and a collaboration with the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).
In 2015, the exhibition: "Tania Mouraud. A Retrospective." was shown at the Centre Pompidou-Metz.
Early life
Tania Mouraud was born in Paris on January 2, 1942. She is the daughter of Martine Mouraud, journalist, publicist turned businesswoman, and writer. Her Romanian-born father, Marcel Mouraud, was a lawyer and collector of modern art. Both her parents were a part of the French Resistance.
She was exposed to art at an early age from her family's travels. She moved to England and then to Germany, where she discovered avant-garde art. Mouraud was influenced by various artists, including Zero, Beuys, John Cage, Gregory Corso, and John Coltrane, additionally befriending artists Gotthard Graubner and Reiner Ruthenbeck.
In the late 1960s, she lived in New York, where she met artist Dennis Oppenheim, bringing her into contact with the New York art scene.
Her first exhibition took place in 1966 at the Zunini gallery in Paris where she exhibited her peintures médicales (French for "medical paintings"), a notably intentionally unemotive collection of human drawings. She commented:
In 1968, Tania Mouraud publicly burned all of her previous paintings.
Later work
Initiation Rooms
In 1968, Tania Mouraud created her first environments, called "Initiation Rooms". It is composed of glossy white spaces which combine to bring oneself toward introspection. Understanding the space in a psychosensory fashion creates perceptions of self-awareness. These environments are preceded musical performances by Pran Nath, Ann Riley and Terry Riley and La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.
Tania Mouraud considers that these spaces are like a room added to our apartments: "An extra space for an extra soul" says Pierre Restany. Tania Mouraud followed a mathematical logic curriculum at Paris 8 University, then leaving for India in Kerala for six years. She still spends six months a year there.
The Work of Art as an analytical proposition
In 1975, Tania Mouraud created in situ installations called "Art Spaces" in which short phrases, written on plastic construction sheeting the size of the wall, question the conditions of visual perception and lead the viewer to a vertiginous awareness from where he can see the depth of what he is doing.
Tania Mouraud continued this theme when she founded the group TRANS with Thierry Kuntzel then with Jon Gibson throughout the installations. Tania Mouraud then exhibited at PS1 in New York where she met Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham. That same year she began teaching at the Regional School of plastic expression in Tourcoing France.
During this period, she began her famous Wall Paintings which were huge black painted letters that were stretched, straight, and very close together to the point of almost being illegible. They form a word or sometimes a phrase, such as "I Have a Dream". In 1989, "WYSIWYG" (What you see is what you get) was exhibited at the BPI of the Centre Georges-Pompidou where "the first of the Wall Paintings of Tania Mouraud concealed the slogan of a well-known brand of computer beneath its lofty appearance".
While she displayed her Wall Paintings series within the art school where she teaches, Tania Mouraud transmitted her vision of the responsibility of the artist facing history: "With this exhibition, I hear students ask the same question I ask myself: what does it mean to be an artist in '92? In 1992, when there are three million people unemployed in a manner seemingly excluding them from society, and that we see the reappearance of the specter of racism? Then there was the phrase, "I have a dream" written in strongly elongated and somewhat illegible lettering, but there will always be someone to decipher them. I speak for that person. It's a secret. "
She exhibits in many art centers in France, England, Canada, and the United States.