Art Basel OVR: Portals

16 - 19 June 2021 

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of Tania Pérez Córdova (Mexican, b. 1979), an artist living and working in Mexico City whose contemplative artworks relate to the temporality and lifespan of objects. She works with a wide range of materials such as bronze, glass, earth, and marble. In her sculptures, she often incorporates a variety of both natural and mass-produced items ranging from jewelry, volcanic ash, gun powder, bread, and money. This eerie combination of elements is used as means of reflecting upon and reenacting cultural values, historical events, and personal stories alike.

 

Tania uses language to situate each sculpture within a larger narrative, incorporating personal, historical, and social circumstances as integral to an object’s making.

“Scene for a Room” introduces a series of artworks conceived as elements in a staged narrative. Iron rain in outer space, impressions of holes that serve as containers, the tossing of a coin, a stranger passing by and contours of domestic spaces are some of the materials and references that occur. 

 

“All the contours refer to spaces I have inhabited and are done by memory. I was thinking how this series is somehow becoming a kind of diary and to me; it’s also related to the confinement and life in the last 12 months.”

 

“I read that in distant planets there is iron rain, melted metal falling from the skies solidifying as it hits the ground. I wanted to materialize the impossibility of inhabiting that location, imagining a pot collecting that unreachable rain, like a leakage from an unimaginable roof.”

 

-Tania Pérez Córdova
 

Following a period of intense global isolation, Tania’s practice feels especially poignant as she zeroes in on the real and imaginary space created between object and viewer. Not only does she reframe this traditional relationship by embedding indeterminate and invisible variables into her sculptures, but she further expands it by forming a connection to a third party: a person, a situation, a location outside in the world.

20 
of 75