Cahier du Cirva

From 2020 to 2022, Tamar Hirschfeld has been in residency at the Cirva, the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Centre, in Marseille. The artist, who usually creates using simple materials, is confronted with a substance at once precious, fragile, and seductive: glass. The "bestiary of objects" she designed were taken from everyday life in France and Provence, which she inevitably associated with cooking. These include such things as croissants, brioches, eggplants, a kebab, and a tomato. Reality in all its ordinariness appears to us here in an uncanny light, combining the artist's trademark sense of humor and disorder.
Neither travel journal, nor book recipe, the Cahiers du Cirva are platforms to spread ideas, process, shapes and emotions born in the Cirva from the dialog between artists, designers, and glassworkers. This Cahier is dedicated to Tamar Hirschfeld's research during her artist residency. Playing with digital collages, Johanna Himmelsbach, graphic designer of the publication, recalls the multiplicity of visual references and genres used by the artist. Therefore glass pieces, pictures, drawings and paintings from the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille—that is hosting the exhibition—are scattered throughout the book. Their simultaneously humorous and tragic proximity produces an association of ideas echoing our current social and ecological concerns.
Facing "the presence of a cacophony of words and shapes, a dissonant band of frying pans and broomsticks mixed with fragments from antiquity", Stanislas Colodiet, director the art center in Marseille, suggests an interpretation of the artist's work within the framework of recent history. This new perspective offers an alternative to the postmodern paradigm.