Tania Pérez Córdova’s first solo exhibition in a Mexican museum, featuring works from the last ten years, was curated by Humberto Moro, Adjunct Program Director at Dia Art Foundation. Setting sculptural materials and everyday personal objects to dialog with one another, Moro examines many themes in Pérez Córdova’s oeuvre: trajectories and becomings; experiments with matter; otherness; practices; the determination of value; the critique of discourse. “The objects are just events that take place in different times, at different scales,” Moro said about this exhibition.
Under that premise, the show—a collaboration between Museo Tamayo and Tina Kim Gallery, Galerie Martin Janda, Galerie Art Concept and the BBVA Foundation, with the assistance of Lena Solà Nogué—begins by balancing a variety of supports and themes, which can change based on each visitor’s route.
Un hombre flexionando su bíceps para mostrar su fuerza (Man Flexing His Biceps to Demonstrate His Strength, 2012/2022), made in orthopedic foam and a well-muscled man; Vista a la plaza de una ciudad que alguna vez fue capital (View Onto the Square of a Onetime Capital City, 2022), with to-scale approximations and bronze spilled on sand, like other works in the same technique throughout the exhibition, with spatial inquiries on trajectories of lines with attached metal elements (for example, La entrada del primer banco [The Entrance to the First Bank], Memoria de un cuarto [Memory of a Room]); the object fragment in Retrato de una mujer desconocida pasando por ahí (Portrait of an Unknown Woman Passing By, 2019), comprising an enameled ceramic piece and a woman clad on a similarly decorated dress, who was however not there at the time of observation; Cosas en pausa (Hablando con un extraño) [Things on Pause [Talking to a Stranger]], made between 2013 and 2016, in porcelain, a SIM card and a suspended phone.
An eloquent example of the relationship between the visual arts’ usual materials and objects used on the body is Tú, yo, nosotrxs, ustedes, ellxs (You, Me, Us, You, Them, 2022), made on granite, cosmetic contact lenses with personalized graduations, and one or several individuals wearing one contact lens in a color different from their natural one (not present either when I visited the exhibition to prepare this review.) There is also a dialog of scales, from the large, irregular roundness of the stone plaque to the tiny lenses deposited in their hollows.
Ineluctably revealing an exploration of things that are not in themselves, but rather happen, as the curator put it, some works on exhibit promote a crossbreeding between inorganic matter’s seemingly impassive being there and the eventfulness of its organic counterpart. Todas nuestras explicaciones (All Our Explanations, 2022) proposes an interplay of molds of unidentified portraits from an image bank, made in concrete and set at variable heights and angles on carbon-steel shelves. The molds are filled with frozen water, which slowly melts and drips as a liquid into large metal vats to emphasize that which passes, transforms, and even gets deformed along a trajectory.
Lluvia (Rain, 2022) posits unusual connections between the action of perforating the large plants on the large planters on an exterior area of the museum, and its transfer to an exhibition wall, were what is perforated are the leaves of other species, such as papaya, monstera, palm, lotus, suspended from steel cables and ran through with silver chains gilded in 14-karat gold. These works suggest a critical reflection about our connections with nature and our contemplation of it, by contrasting it with inert matter. Chains linked with coins are a motif in a different work, a group of molded seashells or pieces of bark, with one of them guarding a falling chain with coins as it piles up on the ground, (Miopía [Myopia], 2020). Such features thread connections between the artist’s various projects.
Is Huelga (Strike, 2018/2022), a small piece of bread baked with cigarette butts, inviting us to critique the constant activities involved in our everyday roles, or to a leisure capable of linking both practices?
The show’s final section proposes yet further connections between inert elements and living matter, along with expressive experiments with the materials.
In Un discurso de 5200 palabras (A 5200-Word Speech, 2022), a mechanism comprised of 5,200 drops of artificial saliva and two copper-coated buckets; in the series Una reja en una reja (A Fence in a Fence, 2022), variations proposing images of the combination of a fence cast in its own mold, aluminum, bird feathers, and clay; Niebla (Fog, 2022), the intervention of a wall whose textured hue is gradually darkened by the application of volcanic ash and sealant.
We reach the closing portion of the show with the discursive games with glass sheets and the manipulation of their shapes, their cardinal orientation within the exhibition space, their reutilization, and their relationship with personal objects, in works like Imágenes 1 y 2 (Images 1 and 2, 2017) Dicen que es como una roca (They Say It’s Like a Rock), Dicen que es común (They Say It’s Common), Dicen lo que pueden (They Say What They Can) and Dicen mucho (They Say A Lot), from 2015. Here we savor the role played by objects containing traces of the events to which they were associated, one of the most powerful motifs in the work of Tania Pérez Córdova, a Goldsmiths College-trained artist who has exhibited solo or as part of group shows at Kunsthalle Basel, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Museo Amparo, Aichi Triennale, Kunstverein Munich, and in the Gwangju, Shanghai and Mercosur biennials, among others.
—EUGENIA MACÍAS
