Tower – Tour

Miniaturized urban catastrophes, labyrinthes 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. The Canadian cultural centre in Paris hosts the first presentation of this exhibition by Pat Badani, a project that plays with our understanding of knowledge as well as with the limits between sculpture and installation, between mythical construction and event. With a life path that embrace the south of Americas to Canada and to France where she now lives, Pet Badani puts her signature on an art-work where the meeting multiple cultural conceptions gives way to the collective dream of building.

Pat Badani kneads and assembles, piles, cuts, draws, photographs; she accumulates gestures as well as images. The elaboration is meticulous but the constructions that result are extremely fragile: 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. Par 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.

Tower-Tour develops with ease around certain myths dealing with ruptured order and the immoderate (that of the snake who brought about the Fall – that of the Tower of Babel). It is an adventure that takes form in a construction that is as mentally vast as it is materially tenuous. If the project rightly constitutes an inquiry into the state of the world, the world it refers to has neither unity nor existence, belonging both to the past as well as the future is exists as a maquette, a project, it refers to tower of another age, it is alive due to its organic matter yet dead because uninhabited.

This exhibition has been organized in collaboration with Christophe Domino.

A publication accompanies the exhibition. 48 pars, bilingual, black & white and color reproductions.