Tania Mouraud was born in 1942 in Paris. She lives in Colombiers (France).
The work of Tania Mouraud, patron of the biennale, has been deployed since the late 1960s in various media: painting, installation, performance, and video.
With Variations, seven kakemonos from the series Mots-Mêlés accompanied by a mural painting, she occupies one of the largest rooms at Les Abattoirs. Her unusual calligraphic style, between letters and barcodes, graphic design and civic examination of public space are all recognisable tropes found here. A slide show of archive photographs showcases the link the artist establishes between the museum and her street work. For the past twenty years or so, Tania Mouraud has associated photography, video, sound, and painting to question our aesthetic and social choices, our relationships with the arts and the authorities.
Cleon Peterson was born in 1973 in Seattle. He lives in Los Angeles (USA).
Inspired by mythological tales, historical facts, and the current reality of our world, the work of Cleon Peterson, favouring hard and cold schematic forms, with a restricted palette in solid blocks of colour, stages a violent and chaotic world, under martial law. His painting and sculptural work falls within a long line of representations of murder and torture, from classical Greek vases to American painter Leon Golub, to Caravaggio (1571–1610) and Francisco de Goya (1746–1828). But it is worthy of note that his inspiration also comes from the daily life of the prison and the psychiatric hospital that Peterson himself has experienced.
In Toulouse, he has created a monumental and dystopic fresco.
Todd James was born in 1969 in New York (USA), where he lives.
Todd James, coming from the world of graffiti, occupies the final room with his fierce and acidulous paintings. Having begun his practice in the streets and metro of New York from the age of eleven, under the pseudonym REAS, he later sought inspiration from pop culture or Action Painting, for his sensual and ironic paintings in flat tints. Less innocent than the joyful palette might lead us to believe, his canvases talk about sex, war, and male domination. He allows himself to inopportunely associate a Kalashnikov and a tea set, children playing and armed warfare, as though convoking Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) all at once.
Todd James also contributes to the fashion and music worlds. He has notably designed album covers and logos for the Beastie Boys, Eminem, and Iggy Pop.