ART-PRESENTATION:Mai-Thu Perret,Grammar and Glamour
Mai-Thu Perret lives and works in Geneva, her distinctive practice crosses a broad range of disciplines, from sculpture to film, ceramics and performance, incorporating multiple references (from avant-garde movements of the 20th century to Oriental philosophy) and fusing disparate methodologies culled from her academic literary background and her experience as a curator.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Badischer Kunstverein Archive
Featuring a representative selection of Mai-Thu Perret’s works “Grammar and Glamour”, is her first major solo exhibition in Germany with a focus on current projects. At the end of the 1990s, Mai-Thu Perret developed “The Crystal Frontier”, a fictional narrative of a community of women calling themselves New Ponderosa Year Zero, inspired by Llano del Rio, a real-life Socialist communitarian project established in the 1910s, in the Mojave Desert. The history of this fictional community is also the primary protocol for the artist’s output of objects. Formally, the works evoke Constructivism and the Bauhaus, movements that saw art as the catalyst for the construction of a new society and the revival of decorative forms often marginalized in the history of art. “I really think,” declares the artist, “that men have dominated Western art history, and I am interested in histories that take account of marginal/forgotten figures or realities. I like using my work as a speculative space in which I can imagine alternative histories to come, stories that are still to be told”. Mai-Thu Perret adds new corpuses to her work each year (mannequins, ceramics, textiles, rattan sculptures, neon and more) like the successive chapters in a concrete, existential fiction. She does more than excavate the elements of modernism: she reinstates them in our present context, as narrative “shifters” at disposal to the viewer. The story of “The Chrystal Frontier” is present in the exhibition through a series of texts in which the women of the “New Ponderosa” commune envision a new world, one they seek to establish via a return to nature and to crafts. At least initially, Perret’s ceramics, wallpapers, clothes, and tapestries must be read against this background, and are interpretable as the results of the fictive production of the women of “New Ponderosa” before these objects emancipate themselves increasingly from their narrative. In the final room of the exhibition, the diverse form languages of arts-and-crafts and modernism become interlocked with one another, and are supplemented by new works.
Info: Curator: Anja Casser, Badischer Kunstverein, Waldstraße 3, Karlsruhe, Duration: 12/7-15/9/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.badischer-kunstverein.de
