postos (saco) 1998-99

Tatiana Grinberg

Felicity Lunn

Entering, seeing and relating to an installation by Tatiana Grinberg is a complex temporal process. It resists straightforward consumption of the work and leads rather towards a dialog with it that is constantly changing and shifting as the viewer's engagement with the work becomes a more participatory occupation of it. Like the fluidity of memory, nothing is ever stable or prescriptive in Grinberg's art. In order to move beyond the initial impact of the rigour and discipline that informs it and enter into the dialogue fully, the viewer has to open themselves up to be drawn in by the diverse objects and their internal relationships with each other.

The developments of Grinberg's own aesthetic has been heavily informed by a particular trajectory in Brazilian art of the last forty years which renders transparent the artist's thought process but also makes spectator aware of their own temporal and sensual experience of the work. Grinberg asks the viewer to participate in the work, either physically by wearing an object that she has made or adapted or cerebrally through putting oneself in the position of the artist, conceptualizing the stages of conceiving and forming a piece. Ultimately the viewer becomes a collaborator whose responses and imagination are necessary to activate the work. For Grinberg, the thought process is as important as the finished work and in many cases, particularly the videos, there is no distinction between the two. The objects that she investigates in the videos 'Places (sack)' and 'Places (Bucket)' are de-mystified through their inclusion in the exhibition and are made more tangible because we are able to watch and then share the artists actions. Similarly, the drawings do not present themselves but unfold through contemplation, each one feeding into the next to create a kind of chain reaction. As in all Grinberg's work, the connections that are set up between sight and touch, seeing and physical sensation, are key to understanding the fluid relationship between thought and perception.

That the viewer is so readily drawn into the work is made possible by both the ordinariness and familiarity of the objects (eggs, plastic bags, a bucket, salt) and by the visceral thrust of the narratives they are used to create. Just as Grinberg has molded silicone, aluminum and wire in earlier works, so in the current videos and installations she uses her hands to shape and intervene with materials in a way which gives new form and clarity to our individual recollections of simple repeated actions such as pattern-making with salt or cupping running water. However, just as she is adept at crafting different substances and materials, so the artist manipulates the viewer's emotions by maintaining a knife-edge between opposing sensations. This circular temporality runs through Grinberg's works, creating a continual displacement that simultaneously draws in and repels the viewer and is charged with a powerful undercurrent of sexuality and desire. In the video 'Bath' the delicate movement of collecting and protecting the water switches to abrupt rejection of it, while the soft carpet both protects the egg shells beneath and, in concealing them, leaves them vulnerable to destruction. 'Tempera', shoot head on the searing Copacabana sun light, seduces the viewer immediately with the sensual fingertip search for eggs buried in the warm sand, subsequently triggering a combination of fascination and horror as the surface is broken and a contact lens is pressed into the dissolving mass at the centre. A flow of associations, from the invisibility of the female sexuality to the eruptions of natural forces in the landscape and climate of Brazil, are evoked as the artist stains her T-shirt with the yolk and raises it over her face. Intimate and collusive, yet carried out against the backdrop of public buildings and populated beach, this ritual-like performance essentialises the artists ability to involve the viewer in an intense one to one relationship with the work whilst at the same time maintaining their awareness of themselves as observer.

It is significant that both water and eggs are symbols of life and fertility which have inherent within them the possibility of both protection and waste. They are also two of the substances most closely connected with the human body and continue Grinberg's exploration in earlier works of industrial materials, such as silicone, plastic and glass, which resemble skin or a membrane. She manipulates their near invisible, immaterial quality to produce objects such as the plastic jug penetrated by a silicone glove, which invert the opposition of interior/exterior to be both simultaneously. Just as the spectator both participates in and observes the objects/video of 'Places (Sack)', 'garments' such as the transparent sack and translucent bucket provide double views, the drawings visible both from inside and outside.

Grinberg's references to the body are frequently reminiscent of both architectural structures that are inhabited and explored with all the senses and remembered or imagined in spaces that are negotiated in mental games. Modernist architecture is a powerful presence in contemporary Brazil and one that has fed into the work of a number of artists. In Grinberg's work there is the continual sense that volumes have the potential to expand in order to provide physical and mental shelter. In reality, however, the structures frustrate rather than protect since they are never large enough to give a complete view of the image inside. When occupying the bucket or sack, the wearer has the impression of being inside of their own head, having to negotiate space that is both familiar and foreign and which suggests that invisibility or blindness is a prerequisite for experiencing what is seen.

Grinberg's installations make use of the space they occupy, objects placed to produce internal relationships with each other but in a way which also defines the negative spaces between structures. They are also responses to the environments in which they were made, in the case of this exhibition to the artists residency in Berlin and her readiness to engage with a new cultural context, both in terms of the materials it makes available and the ideas it engenders. The lightness of touch that informs Grinberg's work, even when it is dense in associations and sensations, is evident in her transferal from the sand of Copacabana to German snow as a cradle for the eggs in the colour photographs. Similarly, 'Places (sack)' was shot in a Brandenburg garden and recreates in microcosmic form the German Romantics' exploration of how the individual negotiates natural landscape.

Grinberg's sensitivity to the specific context in which she makes her work continues the bravely personal basis of her practice and the way in which she has developed a highly individual language to provoke flashes of recognition, an intuition in the viewer of that which remains hidden in human experience. Although her work appear oblique, its performative relationship with the spectator allows the individual objects to transgress their natural limits so that they become catalysts to the imagination. Constantly shifting from the physical and earthly to the cerebral and disembodied, Grinberg's work has a life force which is open-ended and leads to an increased sensitivity to and heightened awareness of oneself and one's environment.