Bernice Olmedo has always had a fascination with the marginalized body, human or otherwise. Whether she’s producing sculptures based on medical devices for the disabled, or questioning the value of a stray dog’s life by making skins and soap from found dog carcasses.
Olmedo’s latest show, “Hic et Nunc,” which opened this week at Kunsthalle Basel, Art Basel time, delves deeper than ever before into her investigations of the “normal” body.
“When talking to people about her work, this question is often asked, ‘Oh, I see she’s interested in a disability, she must be herself or she has a family member with a disability, right?’” “,” Kunsthalle Director Elena Filippovich, who organized the show, said ARTnews. “I’ve always been a little surprised by this question, and I realize that people expect artists to talk about marginalization because they experience it personally, but for her it’s really a metaphor.”
Related Articles
That is, until recently. Initially, plans for the show were delayed by the pandemic, and then delayed again when Olmedo had a serious traffic accident. During the recovery process, she was bed-bound for a month and a half, then started electrostimulation along with other patients over a year.
“She realized she wanted to mechanize her work to mimic some of the recovery techniques she was studying,” Filipovich said. “I was shocked at how excited she was and how much stamina she was to continue the project.”
Seeing Olmedo’s passion even in the face of such a shock, Filipovic decided to postpone the show again, for the last time.
“I wanted you to come to Art Basel,” Filipowicz said. “I just felt sure she was on to something that would be really, really interesting.”
For “Hic et Nunc,” Olmedo collaborated with a rehabilitation center that manufactures prosthetics. In the archives of the center there were various casts of stumps from which Olmedo made a positive team. Olmedo kept the actors’ parts that would normally be discarded, resulting in heavily stripped pieces. Made of transparent plastic and suspended from the ceiling on a wire, almost as if it were floating, it has a definite physical presence amplified by its movement.
Olmedo worked with Japanese scientists to develop a small robotic component for her work based on electrical stimulation therapy she had received. Olmedo and scientists created a machine that would stimulate the sculpting motion of limbs at different points. It is this special movement that makes these things seem present and lively. Appropriately, each sculpture is titled heck and nunkor here and now.
But each sculpture also has a second human name, such as Carlos, Marta, or Yolanda, to remind the audience that these objects are born from individuals.
“The names are the only moment I think the audience is really compelled to see that they are based on bodies, otherwise they are kind of an abstraction,” Filipovich said.
In the show’s second series of work, Olmedo has pushed its use of medical staff even further, incorporating various molds into new compact fixtures. These five works are titled Alethehreferring to the Greek philosophical term for truth or revelation.
All work in Aletheh The sequence is somewhat troublesome in terms of form, calling in organs or embryos – something that is emerging but also outdated. These bodies confirm Olmedo’s insistence that we do not expand our definition of bodies that are natural and thus, rather, get rid of these definitions altogether.
As Olemdo wrote in a statement to the show, “There is no stigma of disability in the world I propose, but only different forms of being, variations of movement, variations of slowness and speed.”
[ad_2]
