To understand how local artists shape the material to extract their vision of the world, you have to meet them. Spotlight is a series of portraits that appears every end of the month. Forays into the world of creators who work on their works in unusual ways, away from current cultural events.
The second our interview ends, on a Tuesday morning in April, multidisciplinary artist Eve Tagny learns that she is a finalist for the 2024 Sobey Prize. The tide is clearly turning for someone who centers her practice on poetics and politics gardens and land for around ten years. After winning the MNBAQ Current Art Prize in the fall, she multiplies performances and installations by drawing on current events and adapting her work to each new exhibition location.
This is how she covered a room at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) with earth for the exhibition dedicated to the five winners. Revisiting Landscapes without ornament, a body of work she had presented a year earlier at her Toronto gallery, Cooper Cole, she hung her photos on the walls and had an imposing wooden structure built that marked the earth-covered area like an archaeological dike. In the center, recordings of his performances played in a loop on two screens.
“I wondered about the value we give to the land, from a decolonial point of view,” summarizes the artist. In the videos, we see performances carried out around the MIL campus of the University of Montreal, which we associate with the gentrification of the Parc-Extension district. On the wooden structure, ceramics and other objects display information about the land that was purchased by the City of Montreal and the condos built nearby. It is said that the City owns this territory, but it was not ceded by the Aboriginal people. I want to demonstrate how we appropriate land and legitimize this appropriation with legal methods. »
Eve Tagny’s approach to scenography is also intended to be decolonial: “Every marginalized person is particularly aware of their own body in public, of their way of navigating in public places. This is why, at MNBAQ, I created a platform which imposes a particular route in space. And if I’m talking about private property, I want that to be reflected in the physical experience of the work. »
The gardens
Number of installations by the artist, including Gestures for a mnemonic garden, presented at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art in 2021, evoke plants and gardens more than the earth. She turned to these subjects after the suicide of someone she loved in a Johannesburg garden just over a decade ago. “This death was extremely violent. I didn’t understand how to continue living. But I went into the garden, and I learned to mourn, among other things because the garden continued to live. Especially since this place is not part of an undead dichotomy. It welcomes all the transformative phases of life at the same time. »
Gardens also take on a political dimension in his work. “These places symbolize all the tension that characterizes our relationship with nature. They also refer to maintenance practices and our desires, as with our bodies. They sometimes embody control and coercion, even violent gestures, such as cutting or uprooting plants. I can therefore incorporate them into my work to talk about colonial violence, death or disappearance, in addition to mourning. »
His exploration of gardens first took the form of images, with the book of photos and poetry Lost Love, created after the bereavement she experienced in South Africa. Eve Tagny then gradually turned to installation and performance. “The performance came from a desire to be interested in ritual. In my first works, I reflected on mourning or the absence of language. It led me to explore the experience of the body. And all Afro cultures in the world are based on performance. In African-American culture, it was a form of survival. We are always in performance, whether in work or in public space. »
Today, political news fuels his practice more than ever. In two recent performances, one at the Swiss Institute in New York and the other at the Optica Center in Montreal, she quoted a phrase from Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security, asserting that Israel “owned” Jerusalem. “In these performances where I treated capitalism as a myth, I wanted to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of property claims on the earth. And I think that artists, even here, have a responsibility to express themselves on what is happening in the Middle East, because everything we do is political. »