| Dates: | 24 January – 10 March 2024 |
| Opening times: | Mon – Sun, 12:00 – 18:00 |
| Venue: | Delfina Foundation |
| Access information: | Please refer to this page. |
An exhibition exploring the intersection of imagination and emancipation.
Delfina Foundation alum curator Yina Jiménez Suriel brings together work by five artists – Adjoa Armah, biarritzzz, Vitória Cribb, Duto Hardono, and Thaís Espaillat Ureña – in an articulation of her long-term and multi-format investigation into the expansion of imaginaries.
Yina’s research posits that across history, communities around the globe have sought to expand the human perceptual system in the pursuit of emancipatory imaginaries, employing various – and often common – aesthetic tools and strategies.
Her project seeks to trace the presence of such tools and strategies within contemporary practices, considering their effect on our bodies and on our ideas of what is possible. Among the tools she has identified to date are repetition, fugue, and transmutation – which form the focus of this show.
In this context, “repetition” is understood as the performance of a certain action several times with the intention that there will be a slight change each time. The concept of “to fugue” is based on the reflections of the thinker Dénètem Touam Bona, for whom “fuguing” isn’t the escape itself, but chasing away what is real and making infinite variations to evade any kind of capture. Finally, “transmutation” is understood as a long-exposure process that creates a disruption in subjectivity.
The works brought together in this exhibition, spanning video, performance, and a newly-commissioned sound installation, can be seen to experiment with and through these tools — contributing to as well as complicating and adding tensions to the wider hypothesis of the project.
This exhibition is a manifestation of the wider research project by Yina Jiménez Suriel that began in 2019 and formed the basis of her residency at Delfina Foundation in 2022. To date the project has taken the form of screenings, publications, events, and exhibitions, including at Pivô in São Paulo, at Cinemateca Dominicana in Santo Domingo, and now concurrently at KADIST San Francisco and Delfina Foundation, before expanding to Manilla later this year.
This exhibition features a newly-commissioned sound installation by London-based artist Adjoa Armah. An in-conversation with the artist will take place during opening week.
Performance
*At the opening of the exhibition on Tuesday 23 January 2024, guests will have the chance to experience Duto Hardono‘s performance Variation & Improvisation for ‘In Harmonia Progressio’, actualised for the first time in the UK. Realised through an instructional score, the performance experiments with repetition and looping, a preoccupation of the artist, as he examines the human condition and temporal spatiality primarily through the medium of sound. The performance will start at around 19:30.
Curator Biography
Yina Jiménez Suriel (b. 1994, La Vega, Dominican Republic, lives and works in Santiago) is a curator and researcher and Curatorial Fellow of TBA21–Academy’s The Current IV, a three-year research project entitled otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua. She is Adjunct Curator of the 14th Mercosul Biennial (2024), and Associate Editor of the magazine Contemporary And (C&) for Latin America and the Caribbean. Her curatorial projects include Vehículos. Una revisión (2018) at Casa Quien (Dominican Republic); one month after being known in that island (2020) at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (Switzerland) curated with the artist Pablo Guardiola and co-produced by Caribbean Art Initiative; and the first chapter of the research project de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas (2022) at Pivô (Brazil) and Cinemateca Dominicana (Dominican Republic) co-produced with KADIST. In summer 2022, she was a curator-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, London. She is part of the curatorial team for Opening at ArcoMadrid (2023-2024) and has contributed to various international art publications and artist catalogues.
Artist Biographies
Adjoa Armah (b. 1988) is a Ghanaian British artist, writer, and educator. Her practice is concerned with the entanglement between narrative form, archival practice, mapping and spatial consciousness, pedagogy, black ontology, ecology, ethnology, and the infra-political. In 2015, Adjoa founded saman archive. Through her archival work, she explores what it might mean to dwell in an archive otherwise, as praxis and an extension of the epistemological horizons of imagination. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Hauser and Wirth (Menorca), Auto Italia (London), fluent (Santander), Salone del Mobile (Milan), and Espace Niemeyer (Paris). Adjoa has taught across art, curating, design, spatial practices, and writing programmes at institutions including Ruskin School of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of Westminster, Royal College of Art, and HEAD, Geneva University of Art and Design. Adjoa began a DPhil in 2021 in Fine Art Practice at the Ruskin School of Art at University of Oxford, with a working title of Atlantic Marginalia: Writing Black Historiography with the Temporary Consciousness of Sand.
biarritzzz (1994, Fortaleza, lives and works in Recife, Brazil) is an anti-disciplinary transmedia artist who investigates intersections between languages, codes and media. She believes in magic and low resolution as important counter-narratives to live the current cosmological dispute of realities. From a critical view of digitality and virtuality, biarritzzz discusses pop culture, meme pedagogies, error and improvisation politics, videogame and internet aesthetics, through poetry and moving image. She has exhibited internationally including the Satélite platform (Pivô Arte e Pesquisa), A.I.R Gallery, Centro Cultural São Paulo, The Wrong Biennale, FILE, IMS (Instituto Moreira Salles), The Shed NY, among others. Her works are included in the collections of Rhizome Artbase (New Museum), KADIST Foundation, IMS, SPAMM.fr, HIPOCAMPO, and MIS-SP (Museu da Imagem e do Som de São Paulo).
Vitória Cribb (b. 1996, Rio de Janeiro) uses the digital environment as a means to express her investigations and reflections crossed by her subconscious, while investigating social behaviour in the face of the development of new visual information technologies in contemporary society. In 2022 she was awarded the PIPA PRIZE Award. Her work is included in the collections of the Denver Art Museum and Brazilian National Museum of Republic. She has been featured in international exhibitions including at Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2023), Bangkok Art Biennale, (2022), Denver Art Museum (2022), Esc Medien Kunst Labor (Graz, 2022), Framer Framed (Amsterdam, 2022), Vellum LA (2022), Apexart (New York, 2022), Galeria Aymoré (Rio de Janeiro, 2021), and Bitforms Gallery (New York, 2020).
Thaís Espaillat Ureña (b.1994, Santo Domingo) is a writer and audiovisual artist with a practice centred on finding the surreal and random nature of everyday Caribbean life and using low-resolution and weird images as political tools to form strange and unexpected connections between things. Their poetry and prose books have been published in the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, and their poems have been translated into English, French, Portuguese and Italian. Their latest poetry book No me voy a morir nunca (I’m never gonna die) was published by Herring Publishers in Mexico in 2023. Their audiovisual work has been shown in the Dominican Republic, the US, and Brazil. Currently, they are writing and coding a digital novel called La fiesta en el catamarán (The party in the catamaran), working on a script for a movie about reimagining their childhood as a genderless child whose house is literally falling apart, investigating the political possibilities of piracy, and running a meme page.
Duto Hardono (b. 1985, Indonesia) is a conceptual artist and educator. Originally trained in painting, his practice traverses the two-dimensionality of collages and drawings to the dynamic incorporation of readymade materials such as everyday objects, old musical instruments, records and cassette tapes in his installations and performances. Often drawing reference from popular culture, conceptual art and anti-art movements, his works are peppered with touches of dark humour and irony in its aim to examine the relationship and paradoxes between humans and time through sound. Hardono has presented work as part of solo, group exhibitions and programmes including at KADIST (San Francisco, 2023), Seoul Museum of Art (2022), PIVÔ (Sao Paulo, 2022), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, 2020), National Gallery of Australia (2019), Rubanah (Jakarta, 2018), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo, 2018), Museum MACAN (Jakarta, 2017), S.M.A.K. (Ghent, 2017), and HKW (Berlin, 2017).
Public programme
A number of events will accompany this exhibition. Further information to follow.
PRESS RELEASE
Opening
Tuesday, 23 January 2024, 19:00 – 21:00
With performance by Duto Hardono at 19:30*
READER
PRESS CONTACT
Helen Gale,
Marketing and Communications Manager
helen@delfinafoundation.com
press@delfinafoundation.com
+44 (0)207 233 5344
CREDITS
This exhibition has been made possible thanks to support from Delfina Foundation’s Network of Latin America and the Caribbean Patrons – and is part of a series developed in partnership with Pivô, São Paulo, and KADIST, San Francisco.