Art Showroom: Ix Dartayre
Ix Dartayre
“A tripe shop, two stones
Three flowers, a bird
Twenty-two gravediggers, a love
The raccoon, a Mrs. So-and-so
A lemon, a loaf of bread
A broad ray of sunshine
A tidal wave, a pair of trousers
A door with its doormat”
— Jacques Prévert, Inventory (excerpt)
“Mnemosyne primarily offers an inventory of antique prefigurations that contributed, during the Renaissance, to shaping the style of depicting life in motion.“
— Aby Warburg, in an introduction to his Atlas.
In 2021, Ix Dartayre reconstructed her bedroom in the basement of an art school, transforming it into the site and setting for relational installations that lasted nearly two weeks. Closed to most visitors at first, the room was initially the stage for shared situations, which allowed the artist “to gather bodies that matter, then to reflect on how to capture their images, how to restitute, reenact, or activate them”.
Eventually, it was opened and exhibited, letting the public’s gaze reveal a rich installation inhabited by the intertwined stories and beings now attached to it.
In the installation Somewhere We Knew, specially arranged for Art-o-rama, the artist revisits the motif of the room—this time as a kind of inventory-room—where a variety of intimate objects, frames, and trinkets are gathered, often personalized by the presence of one or more photographs. “It is a fictive domestic space, porous and traversed by narratives, objects, images, and traces. Both stage and refuge, open yet enveloping, I imagine it as a space the visitor can observe from outside (like a decor) or pass through (as a space to explore, to inhabit),” Ix Dartayre tells us.
Thus, this room belongs to a long tradition of the room as a “mirror of the soul, ” as initiated by Jean des Esseintes in Huysmans’ À rebours, which later experienced unprecedented development in a much more “pop” form among postwar suburban American teenagers. Today, it is a near-sacred space, most often barred by a door, located at the end of corridors in apartments and houses across much of the world that has embraced the Western “way of life.” A “place of refuge, convergence of style and intimacy, portfolio of the self, ” as Clara Defaux emphasizes. Just as on the plates of Warburg’s Atlas, styles and forms collide on the walls and floors of these biographical spaces, projecting as many identities as there are people who inhabit them.
Where Warburg’s inventory seeks to sketch a “representation of life in motion,” Ix Dartayre’s, room reminds us that the self, like artworks, can only be invented—in both senses of imagined and discovered—in the presence, real or imaginary, of the other and their gaze.
Yasmine d’O. Berlin, August 2025
