Tapta

Installed in a loosely chronological order, the exhibition will give an overview of Tapta's oeuvre, which is mainly divided into two "periods": the textile works made in the 1960s until the early 1980s and the works in neoprene from the 1980s to 1990s.

The exhibition first focuses on Tapta's textile works, in which she steadily distanced herself from traditional weaving by applying experimental techniques such as twisting her woven pieces and, in particular, through the use of ropes, which she knotted and joined together into organic volumes. Her work protruded outwards from the wall, became more three-dimensional and increasingly interacted with the space and the viewer, who was invited to experience the works not only visually but also in a tactile and physical manner, stepping around and even inside them. In addition to about twenty original textile works, the exhibition will premiere the unique reconstruction recently made of Tapta's Forms for a Flexible Space (1974). This imposing installation made of cords, in which the visitor can enter and taka a seat, is-as far as is known-the only still existing environment of which Tapta created several in the early 1970s. However, since the original is in extremely poor condition, an exhibition copy was made last year during the Tapta exhibition at Wiels, Brussels, and will be shown in its entirety for the first time at Muzeum Susch.

Tapta's activation of the viewer, as seen in the textile sculptures, also manifests itself in the black neoprene works that she began to make in the late 1980s and which-following an intermediate phase of experimenting with rubber and stretching ropes across the vaults of the exhibition spaces-marked a radical turn in her use of materials. Handcrafted rope sculptures now gave way to sculptures and installations from the industrially manufactured material, neoprene-further developing, however, her idea of flexible sculpture. Large black surfaces connected by metal bars and