Weixin Quek Chong | on the edge of time

Bienal de Mujeres en las Artes Visuales, March 23, 2022

Marina Núñez, Abigail Lazkoz, Weixin Quek Chong, Raquel Algaba, Sandra Val.

 

“She has become a flat image. She has come to mean herself on a screen. Her head spins and spins inside the plasma. In him the thought of her is reborn. Where has he left her body? The woman thinks where she has left her body. Her mirror gives her the image she expected, her nineteenth-century painting gives her the image she expected. The screen is a cosmos and it is a thousand mirrors and a thousand pictures. The machine speaks. Speak because we have something to say. We read through the screen and the screen goes through the brain. What is left off the screen? what is built? The mind disperses around the room and it is the bodies that return to solid form. Thought solidifies across the room and takes on the body of an idea.

 

In 1976 Marge Piercy published her science fiction novel Women on the Edge of time , an acclaimed feminist landmark where she recounts the complicated life of a woman who can see the future. And she, on the one hand, envisions the possibility of a world of racial and sexual equality in balance with the environment, and on the other, a society where the border between people and goods has been eroded.

 

Today more than ever, we are aware that we have to build the appropriate steps as the basis on which to position our societies. Like the female protagonist in the novel, the artists present in this exhibition offer us a transformative vision of our environments and our bodies, with an eye on the future. Whether resorting to figuration or abstraction, from manual and ancient practices such as through the new mediaand the video installation, question the limits of the body and the mind, forming a kind of architectural cyborg that somatizes the environment. A stage that allows nothing but the constant fluctuation between genres and territories. 

 

Can a world be projected from the present? The works, interrelated with each other, seek that environment of dialogue where to build without constrictions: Marina Nuñez, through a technological revision of the Still lifeand the cyborg body in hybridization with the environment, shows still lifes that come back to life after dying as if to indicate that we still have time to protect what surrounds us. On the other hand, Sandra Val gives the body-architecture relationship new meanings, resorting to materials such as ceramics, glass or textiles, not only as part of a visual experience, but also as a haptic perception that helps to build environments from new sensibilities by blurring the temporal structures between past and future. 

 

Abigail Lazkoz and Raquel Algaba work with drawing, installation, and the sculptural object as a whole that plays with the tensions between mind and body, where the fragmentation of history and of our own organism makes us feel a greater connection with external influence as a direct generator of realities. Weixin Quek Chong gathers the speculative aspect of the encounter between material and body and the sensations of inhabiting a technological environment where the individual wants to be avatar and animal and network and rhizome, in search of a future where the body is something more than the body. Do women dream of a time without borders?

 

The virtual exhibition hall seeks to cross those borders where the mind can solidify and show us visions that remained hidden in the universe. in search of a future where the body is something more than the body. Do women dream of a time without borders? The virtual exhibition hall seeks to cross those borders where the mind can solidify and show us visions that remained hidden in the universe. in search of a future where the body is something more than the body. Do women dream of a time without borders? The virtual exhibition hall seeks to cross those borders where the mind can solidify and show us visions that remained hidden in the universe.

 

(Article originally written in Spanish.)