Mother’s heart

Alain Gernigon, Dina Baitassova

Installation, ghaf tree, rhodonite, 2022

180 x 100 x 90 cm

The family name Baitassova comes from kazakh bai tas – “rich stone”, artist’s passion for stones basically originates from this wordplay. Stones often accompany trees in sacred places, linked together - they form an altar, with the stone as a durable and enclosing and the tree as the changing and expanding. Collaboration between Alain Gernigon and Dina Baitassova embodies this lore: the ghaf tree, levitating in the secluded corner of the gallery’s vast “white cube” space with a rhodonite heart carefully inlaid into soil orb. For Alain Gernigon it is an aesthetic research in the vegetal universe, going through experimentation with indigenous plants of each region where he travels. Ghaf tree - highly praised in the UAE, is considered source of life and symbol of stability and perseverance in the middle of the desert. This oeuvre is an homage not only to the local culture, but also to the personal bond of one of the authors. Baitassova’s maternal ancestors are of “kozha” lineage (religious families - descendants of Arabian missionaries who spread Islam in Central Asian region). The family tree, as well as the literal one, becomes a subtle metaphor of the manifest world, in constant renewal and regeneration, dying-to-live, resurrection, continuity, the life principle. 

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. [...] So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” - Herman Hesse