M HKA Ensembles

Installation

Collection: Bruikleen M HKA van Stichting Beeldende Kunst Middelburg/De Vleeshal (Inv. no. VH0278).

Ana Maria Tavares tries via these architectural interventions to commemorate the space around us. By using various typical building materials in her art – like steel, glass, stone and mirrors – she hopes to shake the viewer awake. We are encouraged to enter her work and explore it, but also to give it more than a cursory look. With her installations the artist comments on the failings in our surroundings, and our own shortcomings as well. Numinoso was created for De Kabinetten of De Vleeshal in Middelburg.

The title refers to the silver-colored, mirroring words that stand on the walls, like credit card, credit card, sparkling water, sparkling life, sexo, sunrise, sunset, visions and lexotan (a sleeping pill). Sparkling creations, sunsets, buying on credit, sleeping like a baby – all fantastic things that we long for and even near-venerate. With their help we try to ward off the cares and concerns of everyday life. In a whirl of pleasure and luxury we attempt to ban the notion of ourselves as mere cogs in our contemporary consumption society instead of awakening our consciousness to that fact.

And where does art fit in to all this? Is art also a means of forgetting problems of daily life? Just the contrary, it seems. The words evoke paradisiacal images, but we see ourselves mirrored there. We stand in a superb setting, anything but everyday, but the balustrade and the mirror remind us of recognizable relational situations. In Numinoso Tavares confronts visual art with physical reality, just as she does in her other work, where she comments on non-places like highways, airports and waiting rooms. Here, too, Tavares wants to open viewers’ eyes. Confronting people with their own experiential world and having them think about it – that is the aim of the work of Ana Maria Tavares.