Tania Pérez Córdova: Smoke, Nearby: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Tania Pérez Córdova (Mexican, b. 1979) is an artist based in Mexico City whose sculptural compositions suggest the passing of time. Inscribed in her seemingly static pieces are hints of an active contemporary life: a borrowed gold earring is suspended from a bronze cast, an active credit card is inserted in a clay platter, a stranger’s SIM card is embedded in a porcelain slab. These objects make visible the artist’s negotiations with third parties—with the women left without one gold earring, with the credit card user, the bank, and the whole credit system. The sculptures are all of us, our relationship to digital communication.

Pérez Córdova’s interest in quotidian events underlines how even unremarkable situations can be compelling acts when  associated with a complex infrastructure of social or economic relationships. They are performative works that do not move, “contemporary relics,” as she calls them. Pérez Córdova’s Ascendant Artist exhibition will be her first solo museum presentation in the United States.

The exhibition is organized by José Esparza Chong Cuy, Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.