(In)Tangible World: Postdigital Corporeality
(In)Tangible World: Postdigital Corporeality
Curator: Lava Art Project (Belinda Martín and Paula Ramos Mollá)
Artists: Nora Silva, Giulia Jiménez, Yosi Negrín, Alv_Adina, Alicia Arévalo, Pau Jiménez, Jesu Moratiel, Andrea Muniáin
Dates:15 September – 23 October 2022
Opening Reception: Sept. 15th at 5 - 8pm - DJ set by Bodai at 7:30 pm. Curators’ guided tour: Thursday 15 September 2022, 6:30 pm and 7:00 pm.
Gallery: Abrazo Gallery at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center
(In)Tangible World: Posdigital Corporeality is the first exhibition curated in the USA by Lava Art Project, a platform run by Spanish, UK-based curators Belinda Martín and Paula Ramos Mollá. It brings together recent and new iterations of works by eight Spanish-based artists, many of whom share a Latino background and whose practice is embedded in what the curators call the ‘digital corporeality’ turn in the visual arts. These works place the human body, in all its fullest materiality, amidst the digital and material culture we live in and investigate affective responses of today’s society to such hybrid artworks.
The exhibition revolves, first and foremost, around strategies of engagement. It taps into notions of materiality and digitality to shed light into the relationship between the body and different sorts of virtual environments. It interrogates how we see our bodies (specifically hybrid, mestizo, queer and working- class bodies) in the posdigital world, at the intersection between the material and the digital. Here the concepts of race, class and sexuality are explored through digital techniques employed as means of representation and as metaphors for speaking about bodies that are stuck in corporeal limbos.
Each artist is interested in exploring the corporeal through a digital approach. As such, their work is materialised in a myriad of ways, from performative installation (Nora Silva), immersive video pieces (Giulia Jiménez) and moving image installations (Yosi Negrín) to audiovisual sculptural pieces (Alv_Adina, Alicia Arévalo and Pau Jiménez), interactive video games (Jesu Moratiel) and site-specific installations (Andrea Muniáin). By bringing together both material and phenomenological approaches to the experience of art, this project aims to integrate both digital and analogic modes of aesthetic experience. The idea is to make visitors regain the experience of understanding their own being and body through new forms of subjective representation.
The location of bodies in a digital space that confronts its physical belonging engages with the concept of the hybrid. Just like the mestizo, the hybrid nature of this digital and analogical body of work responds to its position in a sphere that is always in-between. That is, the mestizo resembles the posdigital in that they acquire an ambiguous form defined by their own liminality: as a quasi-digital body or a body with two passports amid what it means to be a fully realised citizen. An arguably non-fully realised entity that dialogues with other ways of body marginalisation, including class and sexuality, which these artworks aim to bring forth.
The eight participating artists explore the concept of hybridity by using digital and physical media, which they use to deconstruct their own mixed identities: from working class bodies who have reach the status of a ‘creative class’ and racialized migrants fighting to obtain residency permits to queer identities demanding recognition in a predominantly cis male dominant gay and straight world. The body as a subject matter that justifies discrimination because of its physical features is here put into question and contested. By getting to know our flesh through other (digital) lenses, this show proposes that hybridity is a quality of our current bodies, one that is present in every subject and that we must not fear, but embrace.
Artists’ Bios:
Alv Adina (Mexico City, 1991) is an artist, music producer, DJ and psychologist. Interested in reflecting the character of the body, Adina created her first EP, “La cuerpa”, in collaboration with digital artists. Her work often combines performance, sound, video art and site-specific installations as means to experiment with her feelings and identity. Through the body digitisation of her own persona, Adina creates her so-called “Sound Prototypes”, in which the artist passes a series of cables through her body connected to a midi plate and plugins that emulate digital sounds, dematerialising and fragmenting her body into different tracks. Adina has created sounds for installation and audiovisuals projects and for digital artists in exhibitions such as Evocar un Fragmento Urbano, INJUVE (Madrid); Fragments, Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras (Alicante); La Voltereta, Can Felipa (Barcelona); Immersive virtual skin, Medialab Prado (Madrid); Collectivizing corporeal virtuality, La Casa Encendida (Madrid); MMMAD Festival, among others. @alv_adina
Alicia Arévalo (Salamanca, 1988) is an artist, curator and researcher focused on gender and technology. They have a degree in Fine Arts from the UCM and the ABK in Stuttgart, in addition to having obtained a master’s degree in History of Contemporary Art from the Reina Sofía Museum. They are currently part of the Malpaís curatorial team in Barcelona. Their research revolves around the construction of queer and interspecies futures. Arévalo explore displaced cartographies of the body through fiction through performance, prosthetic sculptures, and sound. Their work consists of multiple compositions, fantastic hybridizations and mutations that dynamite us in a plurality. Arévalo have presented their works and performances at Haimney Gallery (Barcelona, 2019); Kunsteverein Hechingen (Stuttgart, 2019); MMMAD (Madrid, 2021); Room Number 34 (Madrid, 2021); Cyclo Festival (Madrid, 2022) and NeuroXcape at La capella (Barcelona, 2022). They have also been a speaker at the presentation of New vectors of xenofeminism by Laboria Cuboniks (Holobionte Ediciones, 2022) at the CCCB (Barcelona). @arevalo_alicia
Giulia Jiménez Tani (Caracas, 1996) is an audiovisual artist and filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam. Giulia studied Film and Motion Graphics at SCAD, graduating in 2018. Her work is informed by politics and social dynamics, drawing from coming-of-age stories of characters from underrepresented backgrounds. She combines traditional narrative filmmaking with emerging interactive media such as VR, sensors, and photogrammetry with the intention to question the perspective and responsibility of the viewer. Her VR film Plomo - Journey of a Bullet depicted the police brutality in the riots of 2017 in Venezuela. The piece was showcased in over 20 international festivals, such as the Atlanta Film Festival and DocEdge. Currently, she is immersed in the production of a short film supported by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and in the development of a series which was part of the Sundance Intensive Episodic Lab 2022. @giuliajitani
Pau Jiménez (Ávila, 1994) is an architect from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and a digital artist based in Madrid. Her work focuses on human interaction with technology and the bond of intimacy that is generated between the two. Trying to lead this relationship to a disanthropocentric world is her main objective. Her means of expression are varied, focusing mainly on 3D animation, augmented and virtual reality and the development and 3D printing of parts that are later programmed using Arduino or similar systems. Jiménez also works as a teacher at the Madrid School of Architecture and at the European Institute of Design and is part of the Digigxl collective, with which she frequently collaborates. She has exhibited her work in places such as Tate Gallery (London, 2019), CCCC (Valencia, 2021), Haimney Gallery (Barcelona 2021), MMMMAD Festival (Madrid, 2019; 2020), Tuesday to Friday Gallery (Valencia, 2022), CADAF (Miami, 2020), among others. @urticae_
Jesu Moratiel (A Coruña, 1993) is a Spanish multidisciplinary artist based in Barcelona whose work combines installations, sculptures and digital art in the form of 3D animations and apps. Moratiel’s main series highlight some of the main issues of contemporary thought: life and death in the era of the biotechnological avant-garde, new contemporary beliefs and our behaviours as social and sentient beings in the digital age. In his quest to push the boundaries of art, Moratiel has recently pursued a new line of work presented in the format of a mobile app. Halfway between 3D animation and video games, Moratiel hybrid’s pieces seek to generate a sensitive experience that brings the user closer to the work of art, expanding the way in which the user relates to it. His works can be seen in numerous private collections and have been exhibited at international galleries such as Benjamin-Eck Gallery (Munich), MTArt (London, Paris and Monaco), Cerquone Gallery (Madrid), Gallery Red (Mallorca), Haimney Gallery (Barcelona), as well as curated projects in world-class NFT marketplaces such as Crypto.com and Foundation. @le.moratiel
Andrea Muniáin (Tudela, 1994) is a multidisciplinary architect and artist whose practice focuses on the relationships between digitality and corporality. Both as an artist and in her more academic work, Andrea contests the political component of the digital representation of bodies of the current aesthetic regime, analysing how digital visualisation practices tend towards the standardisation of a universal body. She highlights the need to find a new universal body representation not anchored in the constitutive visual practices of the current hegemonic regime. Her work has been shown in different cultural institutions, architecture studios and universities, including La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Matadero (Madrid), Takk Arquitectura (Madrid), University of Technology Sydney, ELISAVA (Barcelona). @andreamuniain
Yosi Negrín Ruiz (Tenerife, 1994) is an architect, artist and curator. His work investigates the existing and obscure link between the virtual and the real, focusing on how the construction of landscape and material reality are formed in relation to our knowledge of technology and the digital. Negrín’s architectural background has led him to employ several media such as moving images, 3D imagery, ready-mades, and diverse simulations of the post-natural environment, producing installations that play with and disturb built nature and our perception of space. Currently, Negrín explores how technology shapes not only our vision of reality in the present, but also how it unfolds in space-time, giving rise to the possibility of imagining potential futures. His polymorphic practice is developed from a critical and ecological point of view, shifting between the possible scenarios where the prevailing techno-capitalism’s agents operate. Among his most outstanding solo shows are Zona Cero, Cenotafio Digital or 2020, Wasted Panorama. His work has been exhibited in institutions such as Museum of Contemporary Art of Zagreb (Croatia), Conde Duque Cultural Center (Madrid), Maus Hábitos (Porto), TEA (Tenerife), Las Cigarreras (Alicante), the Architecture Biennale (Venice) or in galleries and spaces in Barcelona, Valencia, Palermo, Tehran and New England. Negrín is also co-founder of the Casa Antillón Art and Architecture collective. @yosinegrin
Nora Silva (Madrid, 1988) is a Spanish-Chilean artist and researcher based between London and Madrid. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2017 and has performed at leading UK institutions such as Tate Exchange, the Design Museum and Camden Arts Centre in London. Nora uses performance as a signifying tool, active process in the genesis of alternative cosmologies, as a mechanism to resist imposed subjectivities. She explores projections of identity and the science- fiction potential of self-creation. As a researcher, Nora is interested in the role of food in the arts, the postnatural and contemporary socio-political theory. She also co-directs The Gramounce, a food based contemporary theory research platform, and F·NDO, an exhibition supper club. @noramutcho
Curator’s Bio:
Lava Art Project is a London-based platform dedicated to supporting visual artists of all ages and stages of their career by offering curatorial, arts research, communication and production services. Founded in 2019 by Spanish curators Belinda Martín and Paula Ramos Mollá, Lava has worked in several international art projects such as: Whose Complexity Comes Naturally, Hybrid Art Fair (Madrid, 2022); No es propio de esta época, Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras (Alicante, 2022); Zona Cero. Cenotafio Digital, Espacio Cultural El Tanque (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2021); Organ Vida Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, 2020); The Bodies Are Manufactured, Absolut Manifesto (Madrid, 2020); Link in Bio: Art After Social Media, Museum der bildenden Künste (Leipzig, 2019); 38191613162016135195209451435AuctionCR28112019, The Biscuit Factory (London, 2019). @lavaproject_ @belindamartinart @paula1paula
Opening: Thursday 15 September 2022, 6:00 – 9 pm. DJ set by Bodai at 7:30 pm. Curators’ guided tour: Thursday 15 September 2022, 6:30 pm and 7:00 pm.
This project is supported by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).
Alv_Adina, Alicia Arévalo and Paula Jiménez - Prosthetics and Tracks _ Visuals for La Cuerpa M. Paradoxa, a sound and visual installation with sculpture
LEFT: Alv_Adina, Alicia Arévalo and Paula Jiménez - Prosthetics and Tracks _ Visuals for La Cuerpa M. Paradoxa, a sound and visual installation with sculpture.
RIGHT: Jesu Moratiel – Singularity (2022), mobile app