Archives

Tïa-Calli Borlase

Parade historique
09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Exhibition — Public space

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène
Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Parade Historique, performance (2012)
Courtoisie Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo : Franck Alix, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Caparaçons,  equestrian sculptures (2012)
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase

Caparaçons, equestrian sculptures (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Caparaçon n°4, Le Cheval de Troie, equestrian sculpture (2012)
Courtesy Tïa-Calli Borlase and Gallery Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo: Tïa-Calli Borlase

Tïa-Calli Borlase
Caparaçon n°6, Le Cheval de Troie, equestrian sculpture (2012)
Courtesy Tïa-Calli Borlase et Galerie Dix9, Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris
Photo: Tïa-Calli Borlase

Born 1972 in Chalon-sur-Saone (France), she lives and works in Paris.


Tïa-Calli Borlase created her first Sculptures Membranes in the early 2000s. Produced in series, these strange three-dimensional compositions revisited both the manner and the meaning of textile work, adopting its common and recurrent characteristics. They consisted of suggestive assemblages of women’s lingerie and soft furnishings: bra cups, laces, ribbons, straps, whalebones. The material used, usually found only in haberdasheries, is composed as if in a flower arrangement, like a series of bouquets integrating non-assorted forms and colours that sometimes even clash in a style that evokes Hans Bellmer.
Tïa-Calli Borlase’s surprising sculptures position her as an artist of desire. Each of the Sculptures Membranes titillates the mind, both with its form and by what it suggests. More metaphorical than descriptive, these pieces set the imagination in motion, inspire dreams, mining the seam of unnameable fantasies, over-sexualising the female body.


The caparisons created by the artist are another form of “membrane-sculpture”: they too sculpt the form of the body, but this time it is a horse’s body, the animal being either absent or equipped with the artist’s productions. A fine horsewoman, Tïa-Calli Borlase articulates her projects in relation to horse and rider, freely basing her pieces on the trappings used in non-Western countries or pre-modern periods. For the Printemps de Septembre she is creating an unusual equestrian ballet, a hybrid, trans-historical piece, in which the artist does not consider the horse as an animal but engages in a meditation on this mythical mammal – “man’s noblest conquest,” said Buffon, and for Tïa-Calli Borlase a real seedbed of fantasies. She makes strange caparisons which might be taken to hint at the absent figure of that man-animal hybrid the centaur. The pieces presented in the festival come close to evoking the mythical figures of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, whose symbolic characteristics are announced by John the Evangelist in the Book Revelation (the messengers of death, hunger, pestilence and war). As the artist writes, her project constitutes “a living approach to History, through a parade of caparisoned horses. This history is entered physically by embodying it in equestrian variations, while at the same time offering a reading via five different facets: war, diplomacy, spying, power and entrapment.”


Like the figure of the bull in Picasso, which is invested with all the dimensions of human animality, for Tïa Calli Borlase the horse is there to activate our pars animalis, free of all imaginary restrictions. It is as if she is trying to make us inhabitants of the late human age regret the polish of civilisation and the renunciation of the old myths in which we rode free as the air, mane and hair in the wind.