TANIA CANDIANI
"Mattresses"

The “cruel game of seduction” is not one of the enterprises that move the world. We live in an empire of petroleum and narco-trafficking; nonetheless, sex is a permanent partner of human history.

Tania Candiani was born in Mexico City in 1973. She has lived and worked since 1996 in Tijuana . Self-taught, Candiani has developed as her themes the condition of contemporary women, social behavior and necessary appearances. She utilizes various methods, often from photography to installation. In her previous series (“Gordas – Fat Women” and “Protección Familiar – Family Protection”) she broaches the world from the height of the feminine: the pathologies and requirements of a society that expects many different things of many women, and a woman who toils zealously to please and to live up to those expectations.

In “Mattresses” Tania Candiani takes as a point of departure the intimacy of objects and words. Eroticism and sensuality are taken as irremediably ironic codes. During her artists’ residency at Bemis Center for the Arts in Nebraska in 2004, she began creating a series of objects and photographs that bring together the thoughts, expressions or looks of the sexual act, reducing it all into the space of a mattress. The symbols lose any quality of metaphor, and are effectively direct. It is all concentrated in that stuffed square where we pass half our lives: security, well-being, ecstasy or all their opposites, hidden secrets in the cushioned material, on the skin of our place of rest with undulating topography. Tania infuses these beds with incisions and stitches which, like scars of pain or pleasure, profoundly encompass words and desire.

The series of photos entitled “Love Hurts” is a dialog between the knife, the bed, and the heart. A literal act that seems completely useless becomes ironic, sarcastic and violent in spite of its artificiality.

The ambience is one of softness and surgical cleanliness; the efficacy of the seduction is totally self-contained. As a result, that which is intimate is common; it is pleasurable but also, in constant juxtaposition, painful.

Jean Baudrillard expresses it with a perfect synthesis of contemporary reality: “Only the object is seductive.”

“Mattresses” by Tania Candiani will open on November 29, 2005 at 7 p.m. at Kunsthaus Miami, 3312 North Miami Avenue and will remain open for viewing until January 2006.

- Ana Quiroz