13 Sep 2009

Triin Tamm: retrospective at OUI - Centre for Contemporary Arts, Grenoble

RETROSPECTIVE
Triin Tamm
5. September – 11. October 2009

It's the start of a new season and OUI opens with an exhibition of a young Estonian artist Triin Tamm. For Triin Tamm it is not a turning point. It's not an unusual, coded, already imagined moment in annual routine of our urban lives; it is not a prefabricated time, but a moment as any other which' lightness she would not exchange for anything in the world. She denies the difficulties of a new start - the necessary haircut, buying new shoes, gestures made as if one should forget the preceding times. One of her works is titled Naked Life, it is a series of calendar pages left blank. There is nothing fixed for Triin Tamm, no forced timetable. No stress at all.

Triin Tamm began to work after noticing that there is not enough space for freedom. There is the art world with other artists, exhibitions, biennials, but this does not mean that there is plenty of fresh air. So Triin Tamm decided to approve the incoherence and multiplicity, the clumsiness next to perfectness, simultaneity and panicking cursors. She was born at the end of 20th century, but taking a closer look, her age seems to be undefinable. She comes from a country in Eastern Europe, but she doesn't seem to have any primary residence, neither to belong to any scene.

She is gifted with ubiquity and for this reason nobody knows her too well. With her work she reflects the norms, standards and models; she copies, diverts or makes spectacular objects 'like everyone else'. She allows herself the smallest crafts, tiny actions, simple writings, but also collaborations, project management, editorial adventures etc. Sometimes she works physically, engaging her body and breaking stones until exhaustion, sometimes she seems to be a pure spirit and creates placidly as the dry and clean memory of a computer, for example her capacious collection of titles.

It is not easy to say just a few words - the work of Triin Tamm is not made for synthesis, résumé and objectification. This could also be its main feature: the work of Triin Tamm flees and if one has to compare it to something, it could be a pierced sandbag or a barrel of Danaide or a raining cloud. For the viewer, it is much more simple, just look what she puts on display, read the title of the work, take time to observe the materials, the origin and the shape of the object. Everything is there - it is enough to pay a bit of attention, to be more relaxed and sometimes playful.

From 5th of September OUI hosts a puzzling exhibition where everything that is shown does not indicate any past or future. The season opening in OUI this September is very phantasmic, but paradoxically, it is full of sap.

Stéphane Sauzedde
Art critic and head of OUI - Centre for Contemporary Arts, Grenoble