MUTATIONS
Tiwani Contemporary apresenta Mutations, uma exposição que reúne obras em papel de quatro artistas internacionais: Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze (Nigéria / EUA), Douglas Rodrigo Rada (Bolívia), Helô Sanvoy (Brasil), e Shoshanna Weinberger (Jamaica / EUA). Todos os artistas têm participado de várias exposições e em todo o mundo, porém esta é a primeira vez que seus trabalhos são apresentados no Reino Unido.
Tiwani Contemporary
Helô Sanvoy
Sem Título da série Cyclopaedia, 2013.
Grafite sobre papel.
10 módulos de 29,5 x 21 cm cada.
Group
Exhibition :
Mutations: ruby onyinyechi amanze, Douglas Rodrigo Rada, Helô Sanvoy
& Shoshanna Weinberger
30 May – 5 July
2014
Tiwani Contemporary presents Mutations, an exhibition showcasing recent works on paper by
four international artists: Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze (Nigeria/US), Douglas
Rodrigo Rada (Bolivia), Helô Sanvoy (Brazil), and Shoshanna
Weinberger (Jamaica/US). All artists have exhibited frequently
and across the globe, though this is the first time that their work is shown in
the UK.
Amanze, Sanvoy, Rada and Weinberger follow distinct conceptual
trajectories and approaches to drawing. The works in the exhibition are broadly
diverse in technique, scale and imagery, but share an interest in pushing the
boundaries of drawing as a medium and in asking essential questions around
fixed categories of both forms and identities. Drawing (a line) is, by essence, defining a threshold, however the works inMutations focus on the hybrid, the liminal, the
fragmented and the de-centered as fundamental elements of the human experience,
and as devices to probe the possibilities of the medium. Notwithstanding the
plurality of their practices, the artists in the exhibition posit their inquisitive
approach to the ever-evolving medium of drawing as a vehicle to explore ideas
around shifting identities, hybridity and alterity.
ruby onyinyechi amanze’s works on paper feature a
bestiary of wild animals, ghost-like figures, alien entities and architectural
elements, often connected by modular constellations of bridges and nodes. The
works in the exhibition were triggered by amanze’s longest trip to Nigeria
(where she was born), as a Fulbright fellow in 2012. There, she conceived ada,
an alien alter ego often present in the work and whose evident alterity echoes
amanze’s own experience of (non-)belonging. A reflection on the diasporic
experience, and rooted in the genre of Afro-futurism, her drawings envision
speculative narratives of self-discovery, supernatural existence and
spatio-temporal escapism to evoke ideas around cultural hybridity, belonging
and displacement.
Douglas Rodrigo Rada’s Metamorphosis (2011) was inspired by Jorge Luis
Borges’ Dr Brodie’s Report
(1971), the tale of a
Scottish Presbyterian missionary’s encounter with a faraway society, whose
members practice cannibalism and devour their king’s corpse. The series also
draws upon Ovid’s eponymous epic poems, which has exerted a vast influence on
European art and inspired artists such Titian, Michelangelo and Caravaggio.
Rada’s pencil drawings, detailed
studies of truncated male bodies in various states of torsion, display a
fragmented physicality that suggests the impossibility of a unified self, and a
conspicuous sense of 'otherness' that questions the purpose and perception of
the post-modern human body.
Helô Sanvoy’s work often features linear patterns, which may have
the aspect of written data, but are in fact impossible to
decipher. In Cyclopedia (2013) Sanvoy’s text is
inscrutable. Covered by nebulous shadows of graphite, it highlights the
artist’s interest in ‘word as image’ and the relationship between drawing and
writing. The textural darkness of the graphite reveals anthropomorphic shapes
and sketches of objects: ghost-like figures of anatomical studies, diagrams and
notes that recall the work of Andreas Vesalius, Juan Valverde de Amusco and
Leonardo da Vinci. Produced by an accumulative process, building up and
deleting layers of graphite at
once, the work embraces the permeable states of text and its elasticity vis a
vis subjectivities and memory. Prevailing throughout is a nagging sense of
ambivalence towards language, communication, and a play between memory and
forgetfulness.
Helô Sanvoy - Cyclopaedia II, 2013. Grate sobre papel. 76 x 112 cm.
Shoshanna Weinberger’s gouaches explore the cultural
contingency of beauty and the idea of ‘otherness’ in relation to hybrid
corporeality, race and gender. Her blacked out silhouettes, grotesque
caricatures of hyper-sexualised female figures, all bright lips and protruding
bosoms, envision the black female body as a monstrous, erotically violent
entity, radically at odds with Western ideals of beauty. Ligatured, and
amputated, endowed with multiplying limbs but no head, these mutant Venuses
embody the historical myth of a deviantly sexual black female body, which has
influenced Western representations of black women for centuries, from Saartje
Baartman to Nicki Minaj.
Tiwani_May_14_009 © Sylvain Deleu
Tiwani_May_14_009 © Sylvain Deleu
Tiwani_May_14_009 © Sylvain Deleu
Tiwani_May_14_009 © Sylvain Deleu
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