2023-09-30 11:21:28
NIEVES CORREA: HANDWRITTEN
Writing
Nieves Correa stars in the last individual exhibition of the 2023 season at the Sala Robayera in Cudón-Miengo (Cantabria), organized with the institutional support of the Miengo City Council and the Department of Education, Culture and Sports of the Government of Cantabria.
Nieves Correa’s plastic work is always nourished by his own performances or has as its starting point a “performative process” in which the body, space and time are present. The works gathered in this exhibition have as a background different actions carried out between 2015 and 2021. This is the case of the photographs that make up the series “Days of wine and roses III” (2016), which have their starting point in a performance in the CentroCentro space in Madrid on November 25, 2015 or “A fragment of life III” (2015), which originated in another action that took place at La Cave Poésie in Toulouse (France) on November 30, 2015. “The first dress” (2010-2018), also arising from an action at the Turbine Giswil art center in Switzerland (2009), is an installation made up of a sewing mannequin with a cotton dress reconstructed with pins and 242 photographs that document the process of writing the fragments that make up said dress in which the artist records different dates starting with her own birth. Sometimes the pieces are accompanied by visual scores that describe the different “modes” of the body and objects in a timeline; voice, sound and other audiovisual elements. Finally, Robayera’s exhibition houses an installation made up of a video projection and nine agendas corresponding to the three-year periods 2013-2015, 2016-2018 and 2019-2021 with the artist’s daily annotations that have been crossed out until they are illegible as a souvenir of a past “that once it happens, it disappears,” so that “all events become equal in the oblivion of the crossed out lines.” The past is present, but it is indecipherable, as Tomás Ruiz-Rivas warns in the text that accompanies the exhibition catalogue, alluding to “lost, censored, incomplete memory.” Her work has a political dimension that shows us “how those fractures, those silences, those absences of memory, are part of us, of our own bodies, and have been incorporated into our identity.”
Nieves Correa’s actions usually incorporate small gestures linked to everyday life or invisible tasks that are based on repetition, emphasizing the importance of small details that we hardly notice and articulating a form of writing in time that evokes memory and memories, as well as the voids they leave us. The movement of the hands has to do with the title of the project itself, but also with the importance of the manual gesture as an essential part of artistic work.
In most of his pieces, Nieves Correa uses photography in relation to his body in dialogue with elements and materials that he has used and modified in his live works. Her actions are always related to the space in which they occur. She likes to explore and exploit the physical and/or symbolic possibilities of the place in which she works. That space helps him shape the formal structure of her proposals. It is possible that a material, a situation or an obsession triggers a process, and from that first approximation she constructs the performance from a formal perspective analyzing time, space, her presence, the audience and the materials available.
Artist and art historian, Nieves Correa began her career in action art and performance at the end of the eighties, in a panorama, as Tomás Ruiz-Rivas highlights, still dominated by neo-expressionist painting and with the Madrid Movida as a backdrop background, which also favored figurative painting as the main means of expression. Interested in experimental practices such as performance, video art or installation – disciplines that had hardly been spread in Spain – since then she has participated in festivals and meetings, mainly in Europe, but also in Canada, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and Japan, among many other countries. She has also directed the Acción! MAD International Festival, in its annual editions between 2003 and 2019, which has featured artists as relevant as Esther Ferrer or Concha Jerez, among other names.
Nieves Correa, Hand written, Robayera Art Room, Old Schools of Cudón, Miengo, Cantabria. From September 30 to November 5, 2023.
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