ACVIC celebrates life and creation with "LUX & MATRIX" and questions patriarchy

The Center for Contemporary Arts ACVIC presents, until December 30, the exhibition LUX & MATRIX, which takes as reference the place where some living beings are conceived and the ability of humans to create works of art. The exhibition, open to the public until December 30, includes works by twenty artists, most of whom have never been exhibited in Vic. In addition, some of the works are presented for the first time worldwide such as Las lunas que no vi , 2021, by the Ecuadorian artist Saskia Calderón; the triptych Trāns pelvis Os, by the Swedish artist Victoria Verseau ; the video Conversations with elementals and other stellar beings #4 The cave, 2018, by Eulàlia Valldosera; or the site-specific action “ My body doesn't belong to me ”, by Santiago Sierra.

This last work stands out for having been carried out last September in the same premises of the center that hosts the exhibition, where two long-term unemployed - a man and a woman - were hired by ACVIC for four days and five hours a day to write, uninterruptedly, the sentence "My body doesn't belong to me" ("El meu cos no em pertany"). With this statement, the artist Santiago Sierra calls into question the feminist slogan that claims the power of women to decide about their own bodies on issues such as abortion, wearing the veil in Islamic cultures, and many others patriarchal impositions that weigh on him, but he does it not to question this right, but to show that neither men nor women are the owners of their bodies, subject to the dictatorship of work, and that both must sell the their time to do menial work.

The creations of the artists included in the exhibition dialogue with documentary images and other exhibitions or with photographs of natural and historical spaces that complete the discourse. Among them, we find those of creators like Ana Álvarez-Errecalde, who presents the works El nacimiento de mi hija (2005) and Resurgir (2019); or the black embroidered Shawl by Josefa Tolrà, an artist and medium who developed her work from the age of 60 after the trauma of the death of two of her children and who embodied the voices and visions that were dictated to her by spiritual beings in messages written in numerous notebooks and in magnificent embroideries such as the one that can be seen in the exhibition and which shows the configuration of a female uterus and ovaries.

The other artists present at the exhibition are: Anonymous, Austin Camilleri, Cuco Suárez, Eulàlia Valldosera, Grup de Defensa del Ter, Isabel Banal, Juana Castro, Kyung-Jin Cho, Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint Phalle, Núria Duran , Núria Pompeia, Pau Costa, Priscilla Monge, Saskia Calderón, Sergio Caballero, Tania Berta Judith and Victoria Verseau.

Apart from being artistically multidisciplinary, the LUX & MATRIX exhibition as a whole is transhistorical, transgenerational and transgender. In fact, it is proposed as an "index of a possible imaginary museum, it gathers pages consciously extracted from an endless atlas and is configured as an assembly of multiple voices and visions. Images and works of art are associated iconographically and symbolic to reflect on life, death, pleasure and beauty, understood from different cultural, ecological, gender and social class perspectives," explains exhibition curator Rosa Martínez.

"In our world, the patriarchy organizes, controls, legislates, penalizes. And one of the fundamental points of its control are women's wombs: it is the patriarchy that establishes when a child is considered legitimate or illegitimate, when the abortion is allowed and when not", points out the curator. "Capitalism has come to normalize rented wombs and turn into a salable commodity the being that is created inside them. For this reason, our reality can only be transformed from new modes of intelligibility and action , from grammars that allow us to articulate forms of critical awareness and active political participation. The exhibition discourse of "LUX & MATRIX" celebrates creation and life, and at the same time questions aesthetically and ideologically what it means to bring a world to the world whether a living being or an artistic creation," says Rosa Martínez.