Touching the Earth: Ritual Drawings and Dance of Erasure
Artist talk on Friday, April 5, 7 - 8 pm
Performing dance of erasure on Friday, May 3, 7 - 7:30 pm
Marie-Therese Latuner creates territories where drawings, installations, dance, and videos are mixed. In what she calls the transported gesture, she displaces the ancestral traditions of powder drawing: those learned in South India, on the doorsteps of houses at dawn with Indian women, or elsewhere in the temples of Kerala with the artists/officiants.
Latuner's work builds spaces for encounters based on the experience of these ritual practices, with respect, but without imitating, without repeating, but trying to restore their fundamentals, to highlight the depth of these rites and the underground, but essential, transformations of which they speak.
The powders used are those collected in the landscapes around San Francisco: sand, sandstone, and Arizona soil. This practice also aims to be linked to the places, the soils, the richness and diversity of the natural powders of the surrounding landscapes. In this way, weaving links with the sublime nature of the American West and with the history of its sacred lands.
The dance, to close the exhibition, will come by with movement to disperse and erase the drawings, and will take with it the remains of this powdery trace. This installation is a tribute to all these ritual traditions, sometimes despised, opening up important paths for a humanity that is sensitive and respectful of the Other : Body, Plants, or Star Dust.
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Marie-Therese Latuner has been regularly exhibiting works of powder drawings and performances for the past twenty years, accompanied by various dancers in France and Paris, most notably: Night of the museums at the National Museum of Asian Arts in Guimet (Paris), and Centre d'art contemporain de Clamart, Galerie d'art contemporain d'Auvers-sur-Oise, Institut des Cultures d'Islam (Paris).
She has participated in various Biennales of contemporary art, most recently that of Sarria in Spain, the Biennale of art of N mes, and in the field of dance at various festivals. She has also been invited to various artist residencies including Alliance fran aise de Pondichery (South India) and the Mahatma Gandhi International School of Ahmedabad in Gujarat (India).
In 2016, she participated in the writing of the catalogue for the exhibition Carambolages au Grand Palais, at the invitation of exhibition curator Jean-Hubert Martin. She is currently an art teacher at the Lyc e Fran ais de San Francisco.
Cost: $15 - $35