Rehabitar el silencio

Curated by Paola Dávila

Presented by JuanCano68 projects

Ana Blumenkron

Tania Bohórquez

Sylvana Burns

If we review the work of feminist women artists produced during the seventies and eighties, we will see that the body is a recurring theme. The need to disrupt the patriarchal gaze on the body led the artists to investigate it, dissect it, penetrate its substance. But what became evident, as Andrea Guinta mentions, was not only the fluids, genitals, and secretions, but also "an insistence on a political reading that considered the naked body as the bearer of transforming power." Forty years later, which are the questions that artists who identify as feminists ask themselves today? What do they question?

This exhibition brings together the work of Ana Blumenkron, Tania Bohórquez, and Sylvana Burns, Mexican artists who present work produced in other countries, but who engage in a dialogue with their place of origin. Trauma, incest, power, and control over the body: social violence exercised mainly on women are concepts that run through the production of these three artists who start from their own bodies or others to re-inhabit them. In their work, they address recurring themes for feminism in relation to money, love, the body, and sexuality. From there, they produce images that are based on experiences and are presented from vulnerability, but a vulnerability that leads to strength, not weakness.

In the 'Trauma' series, Bohórquez creates an iconography of sensations and memories based on experiences of violence and abuse within the family nucleus that places a young, androgynous body, which has not yet been violated. It starts with objects to which an experience is transferred and that are used as transition objects towards resilience.

With an anti-solemn and humorous attitude, Blumenkron resorts to fiction or sexting as intermediate zones between herself and reality or the outside world, between the subjective and the objective to talk about love, patriarchal structures, and social impositions. It produces from self-referentiality, the color pink, the veil, and the fragment -conventionalisms historically linked to the "feminine"- to show mechanisms and practices from which women are made invisible, marginalized, and stereotyped.

Burns dissects, analyzes, and examines the female body starting from the patriarchal gaze and its power over its historical representation. It recreates the cold, scientific male gaze on a body that is subdued, and objectified, which refers to compositions of medical studies from the 19th century. It creates a historical bridge by resorting to a photographic technique from the same period and confronts us with a look from another time that is not necessarily foreign today. In 'Dissected', the hand is the culmination of the exercise of strength and power over the female body.

In their work, Blumenkron, Bohóquez, and Burns confront the same ancient exercise of power, with different compositional structures. The ways of evidencing it change, but not the violence exerted on us. They start from the body, sex, and desire as fundamental forces to talk about that which is not usually named, to reconfigure reality, to permeate it, and to influence it.

Paola Davila

May 2022