Perrotin gallery, Hong Kong, is happy to present a solo exhibition of Tatiana Trouvé entitled “House of Leaves” from March 20 to May 17, 2017. The exhibition will comprise a series of new works. The opening will be held within the same week as Art Basel Hong Kong.

“To inhabit is to be at home everywhere”. This curious openness to the world, which the Italian architect Ugo La Pietra made his program, has long captivated my attention because it emphasizes mobility and outlook as the only ways to be at home, potentially, everywhere. In contrast to sedentariness and property, habitation no longer designates anything here other than this singular scope of vision.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, men had miniature images of their eyes painted on a fine slice of ivory and set into rings or brooches which they sent to the women they secretly loved. The women who carried this secret declaration on their fingers indicated that a man had fixed this gaze upon them and that he had captured them. With these “eyes of love,” the gaze that looks at me and which I carry, becomes also the one with which I look. I like thinking that the reach of our gaze also contains the look of another, just as when we walk, we follow the footsteps of another. I like thinking that inhabiting is a way of seeing, and resting our gaze on an object or a landscape, familiar or foreign, to which we are connected without belonging to it.

And if the host of these ways of inhabiting is inevitably an individual who travels, who belongs to the world as much as the world belongs to him, no doubt only one habitat enables him to fulfill his experience of life: the hut. To be at home everywhere requires, it seems to me, ephemeral architecture, without threshold, where the dimensions of domestic and wild, the boundaries of interior and exterior, inside and outside, overlap and harmonize, forming an intermediate world that forges a way of reconnecting with the world. It does not matter if these constructions seem unstable, or if they could blow away with the first gust of wind. They are not made to resist the world but to merge with it, up close and far away, here and unto infinity.