For her first exhibition in France, the artist Tamara Kostianovsky presents her works at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, in Paris, until November 3.
Distributed throughout the different rooms of the museum, the textile, animal and plant works punctuate the visitor’s journey and enter into an intimate dialogue with the collections. The contemporary meets the historical; between rupture and continuity. The experience is intended to be immersive and introspective… inviting the viewer to question their relationship to nature, as well as their food and clothing consumption. Should we still survive at the expense of others? To evolve in a life-size vanity is, in a way, to become one with this cut tree stump or this carcass suspended in the air… between life and death… metamorphosed.
The use of upcycling underlines a cyclical and random dimension of life and things… “nothing is lost, everything is transformed”… but it also awakens a feeling of responsibility… individual and collective. Put our desires and needs into perspective to awaken a form of awareness of the ephemeral. The work of art participates in this mastery of resources by sublimating the beauty of “the flesh of the world”. The pieces of colored fabric become this pulpit… literal and metaphorical. To read in the rings of a felled tree, its age and its history… and to see a bird emerge from the entrails of a slaughtered ox… is to rub shoulders with hell and paradise… beauty and ugliness… joy and sadness…the end and the beginning…life and death. The artist bears witness to the paradoxical and universal dimension of human existence… facing choices and contradictions. It is also part of the long tradition in the history of the art of the slaughtered ox since Rembrandt via Chagall or Bacon… to serve as a vanity.
What emerges from the works is an anonymous and silent violence… this daily brutality which goes unnoticed through complacency or habit… that which is expressed through the cuts in the trunk of yet another tree or at the end of the butcher’s s-shaped hook. And yet, the light and the colors, the rotation in the air, gives life to death… graceful. The spectator is seduced by this macabre dance… causing a burst of empathy and emotion. He becomes aware of the beauty that flourishes in the diversity of species and the true richness of nature which must be respected like a work of art…
And finally, if the exhibition made the viewer an animal in their own right… sublime and vulnerable… full of hope for the future…
More info:
https://www.chassenature.org/expositions/la-chair-du-monde
https://tamarakostianovsky.com
ABSTRACT MIMESIS 