
May
16 to September 6, 1997
Press
Release
Miniaturized
urban catastrophes, labyrinths on paper where the methodical construction
of a fictional world takes on the aspect of a scientific project. Heaps
and accumulations proposing an order and its subversion - this is what
« Tower-Tour » is composed of. It is a project that plays
with our understanding of knowledge as well as with the limits between
sculpture and installation, between mythical construction and event.
Constructions
made of bread, documentary plates, videos, one of them showing the building
of a city and its collapse, the other its underground desertion or regeneration.
Pat Badani borrows the architect's planimetric designs, note-taking
and documentation of work-sites, the geologist's topographical drawings
and the surveyor's methods of prospecting.
With
a life-path that embraces the south of the Americas to Canada and to
France where she now lives, Pat Badani puts her signature on
an art-work where the meeting of multiple cultural conceptions gives
way to the collective dream of building. (1997)

Solo
exhibition curated by Catherine Bédard
and Christophe Domino
A
publication accompanies the exhibition : « Pat Badani- Tower-Tour
», 48 pages, bilingual, texts by Ch. Domino and C. Bédard,
B&W and colour reproductions.

bread-bowl
installation of variable dimensions


Text
by Pat Badani: "Tower-Tour"
is a hybrid installation-work that I began in 1994. I initially produced
this work in collaboration with the food industry. In a sustained effort
with five bakers, I molded and baked thousands of bread-bowls during
3 years in a medieval Paris bakery. The bread-bowls are my building-blocks
to build fictional structures for habitation and imaginary cities.
I
use a city built of bread-bowls to draw parallels between past and present
transformations in social space. I exploit the material and the form
in their anthropological and symbolic dimensions. The bread-bowl is
a visual marker that refers back to the origin of agriculture and the
first sedentary social formations. Both bread and bowl-making signal
the development of craftsmanship and the raising of cities.
I
use cities as theme in order to explore world-making. Some of my questions
are: How many worlds are there? What are worlds made of? How are they
made? The myth of The Tower of Babel and Jorge Luis Borges' "The
Library of Babel" refer to worlds constructed in relation to knowledge.
They have served to nourish my questionings.

Excerpt
from the text by Christophe Domino, "Tower-Tour" catalogue,
p. 24.: "The
work on Tower-Tour began from a minimalist, sculptural
act, performed on a primary resource... (bread). Pat Badani chanced
upon a form-matrix, ...first contained, then containing: the form of
a bowl, a handheld object that appears naturally predisposed to serial
reproduction...Now full, now empty, the concave form of the bowl is
an invitation to fit inside each other, to pile up, to form towers...
A Babel of bread, a tower of dough, the city as organism...Piled or
impaled on metallic supports, the bowls form structures of varying sizes.
Some elude their verticality by posing as sheets, planes, terraces,
or hanging gardens (Babel and Babylon are one and the same); others
do so by appearing to rise up and out, to overflow, as if the city were
bleeding and confessing its organic consistency.From this structure
in constant mutation, Pat Badani has explored several directions and
several vantage points. Video, which captures the infinitely repetitive
tale of collapse and ruin...the photographic image..."

Installation
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Installation
views at the 100m2 gallery space |
The
"Tower-Tour" installation comprises four bread-bowl constructions,
two videos, and four long documentary plates. The documentary plates
are composed of graphics organized in horizontal display units. These
explore 4 different topologies through a multiplicity of self-generated
documents: photographs, drawings, collages and watercolours. I created
a labyrinthine trajectory for the exhibition through the use of the
gallery's modular walls, offering a circulation with several points
of entry and exit, as shown in the following maquette.


Documentary
Plates
Excerpt
from the text by Ch. Domino, "Tower-Tour" catalogue, Notes
on the Plates, p. 29: "Model
of modern science and dream of shared understanding, the synoptic plate
offers a globalizing vision that Pat Badani uses as a realm in itself.....Between
picture to look at and page to read, the plates stage the exhibition
in such a way that the gaze can circulate from plate to plate....The
motive for resorting to this support is double and on two degrees. A
good image of this practice is the puzzle whose principle establishes
a dialectic between the global and the fragmentary, unity as accessible
ideal and fragmentation as starting point..."

"Air-Eau",
documentary plate (detail), 122cm. x 350cm.
(the four plates are composed of photos, photo-montages, watercolours,
drawings and collages)





"Demarcations",
documentary plate (detail), 122cm. x 350cm.

Excerpt
from the text by Ch. Domino, p. 29.: "The
plates are, or at least can be, rearranged with each exhibition. They
bear every resemblance to logical constructs and titles are chosen accordingly,
confirming, often in ironic tones, their didactic authority. Somewhere
between geography, ecology and techno-urban futurism, between road notes,
picture book manuals and the pseudo-scientific stories of Blake and
Mortimer, these plates offer room for multiple readings."

Videos
Still
from one of the videos: "Last and Least"
Bread-bowl
constructions
"Metropolis",
installation at the Canadian Cultural Centre
(bread-bowls, metal supports, laminated wood base)

"Entitled
Metropolis, this model of the model offers the viewer another
dimension. It will serve for various reconstructions...an open-ended
sculpture that will occupy space differently with each installation,
its frail stacks marking out odd urban landscapes which offer the charm
of a builder's model, yet also the anxiety of a metropolitan maze, or
the vision of its catastrophic ruin..." (Ch. Domino, p. 25, 26)

"Snake",
malleable cord composed of bread-bowls

"Once
reduced to the size of Metropolis, the bread-bowl produces another
metamorphosis which becomes an object in its own right. By hundreds,
small bowls have been strung onto a rope forming an inert snake with
movable joints...From a mass, the snake becomes line, both separator
and link..." (Ch. Domino, p.26)

Text by
Pat Badani: "Snake"
is an ongoing project in urban and non-urban spaces around the world.
I take a piece of the malleable bread sculpture with me when I travel
and I use it to delineate, separate or unify spaces. I install a fragment
of the bread-cord and leave it in place until its partial or total disappearance.
"Snake" has been weathered out by climatic conditions or
in
different geographical sites, a process documented through video and through
photography. These documents and other graphics explore the notion of
unstable boundaries and are shown in the documentary plate titled "Demarcations".

"Snake"
(partially consumed) hung from the Center's 6 story building
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