SEW DENTS ON EVERY SKYLINE: Solo exhibition of Marina Zumi
Holding up half the sky while traversing through different streets, different times — a long neon wire unraveled from a spool through nights that seemed incessantly long. The length of the wire kept running through cities, mediums and moments but never ran short enough to slip out of the need for one action:
Sewing.
Passing through holes were knots that kept multiplying, ending, only to begin again : on another medium, another street, another city; same body, its different stages, working through many spaces and institutions. With every running stitch, a seam finish, recovery from many losses, and in that time, one desire :
in noctem, seize the light
sew dents on every skyline
SEW DENTS ON EVERY SKYLINE is an invocation for the viewers to extend themselves as flaneuse and encounter the new body of work presented by artist Marina Zumi. Born in Argentina and now based in Berlin, she has traveled through the many avenues of London, Miami, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and now presents her works in Mumbai at Gallery XXL .
In between the entry of the gallery wherein the artist in residence has created several works over the past two weeks, and the streets outside – a tricycle found in Mumbai, taut in neon lights, hangs from the ceiling, welcoming the viewers into different trinities and its multiples, displayed on canvases and papers as well as through light and sculptures.
Two skylines then present themselves as the juncture in between the earth and sky which constitute any horizon, interrupted by verticals of pillars and columns – fragmenting, disintegrating, often turning into ephemeral structures. As thin threads wrap a chair and cut through three canvases, a slightly off-centered sculpture connects the base and the capital of a pillar that lacks a column, with lights running in between from its head to foot.
What also accompanies these recurring images of architecture are interiors of pools and doors with absent bodies, their intimate presence often felt as : a small CCTV camera faces a hollow frame, a passport swings open curved lines and globes, and a mistake that tears apart every skyline turns into a boat. As an image of news, miniscule in its form, shatters windows with curtains, a liminal space which demarcates the interior, exterior and within is revealed, and in that the artist invokes a triad central to her process. The triad that depicts the act of art making and its relationship with the body, the streets and a studio.
Her body, in the process of sewing for hours – isolated from the noise of the world, exhuming the complexity of the human condition and interpersonal relationships. The street – often in conjunction with norms that entail gender and sexual identities, holding pillars that depict power, with the artist now deviating from it by setting them afloat in pieces. The studio – a space that breaks open the individuality of an artist assigned female at birth, finding her position in structures of white cube that conjuncts many parts of her own identity, now enabling: an exposition, an examination, and a beginning to the process of subversion.
While negotiating through this triad, a blotting of many surfaces with slow paced gradients in the background – meeting each other at a central white space with days and nights converging into an equinox of final mark making: a dent, now created in the form of light. Filling the void – the sewing of neon wires becoming a central motif for the artist to reconfigure newer ways of making art, puncturing every skyline, bit by bit, through spotting an image, tracing a path, sewing a blotch of thunder with such care, that new horizons, impaled and mended, open up those experiences that are common to us all: love, pain, loneliness.
If one were to ascribe a macro political understanding of what takes shape when women occupy streets, and change places to create art, the description of it in this exhibition lies with Marina – sewing, with ardor and nuance her own bodily experiences; creating and recreating moments of respite and reflection to sail through times of upheaval felt by all at some point. Evoking meanings of artistic expression in moments of conflict, injury, repair, the exhibition bends pathways at several junctures through plurality in forms, mediums, and familiar images of the everyday, ultimately provoking one question:
What dents shift the spaces occupied by those who hold up half the sky and the many identities they have to now expose, mend and claim?
