2023-09-30 12:23:33
WOMEN VIOLENCE, BY MARISA GONZÁLEZ
This work about violence against women was made in the United States and is representative of various incipient interests that converged in the 70s in that country: technology, feminism and politics. It was created between 1975-1976 in Washington DC and was part of an extensive series with the generic title Woman violence. It consists of several photographic sequences of women’s faces taken of fellow students and Mary Beth Edelson, a professor at the Corcoran School of Art – where Marisa González was studying – and a New York artist who was a reference in the second wave of the feminist movement. She made two collaborative projects, one of which all staged sequences of violence in response to the torture suffered by women during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and was titled The Download.
The other, titled At Mulata, is about the identity of a woman, in this case a mulatto woman, and is directly related to the lack of identity, its concealment, and the multiple faces of an undefined identity. Liz Williams, Marisa González’s partner, was a mulatto woman, very white-skinned, but with black features: thick lips, a wide nose and afro hair. She suffered serious racial identity problems, she felt out of place. Was she white or was she black? She perceived herself as white among blacks and black among whites.
Marisa did a photo-performance with her. Combining their respective artistic works, Liz made sculptures of masks of her own face on different supports, masks behind which she hid and questioned her true identity, and Marisa interacted with her and her masks, using a camera, generating this project.
Some of the photographs that are part of The mulatta and her masks They have done it previously in other exhibitions in spaces such as Tabacalera, Madrid, in 2015, on the occasion of the retrospective Domesticated Records, which toured in 2016 to the Galician Center of Contemporary Art, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela. Before the end of this year it will be exhibited at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art, IVAM, Valencia, and at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon. But in this individual other unpublished ones are presented, in black and white and in color. Most of the latter were produced with an innovative procedure at the time, through the use of communication technologies, then incipient, which gave rise to the so-called Thermofax Series.
Of these same Thermofax Series -part of which has recently been incorporated into the MNCARS collection-, a wide representation of The download, Woman violence has been selected with an individual proposal from the gallery for the most important international contemporary art fair in Italy, Artissima, to be held in Turin, from November 2 to 5, 2023.
Marisa González, The mulatta and her masks, (1975-1976), Isabel Hurley Gallery, Paseo de Reding 39 Bajo, Málaga. From September 29 to November 10, 2023.
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