Juliana Cerqueira Leite

H1, 2017

H1, 2017 was made alongside a body of work during a four-week residency in the Venice. Using the gallery (Alma Zevi) itself as a temporary studio space, she worked alone and intensely, to create sculptures that respond to the volumes and proportions of the exhibition room as well as the unique context of Venice. Using Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel Solaris, famously adapted to film by Andrei Tarkovskij, as a reference, the works in the exhibition play on notions of the returning past, the simulacrum and the formless. The sculptures relate, as does all of Cerqueira Leite’s work, directly to the human body, in particular the female body. This precise identification exists as part of a larger conceptual field, which engages with contemporary feminist theory, as well as the history of feminist art. However, Cerqueira Leite’s work places what might be understood by some as two discreet values – feminism and femininity – into question. She does this by presenting multilayered, polychrome, visceral life-casts of her body, defined by several overlaid and interconnected poses. The poses converse with the conventions of female portrayal in Antiquity – with exaggerated contrapposto and hands resting on a thigh, or covering a breast. Thus, precarious and unnatural poses become a choreography that is fixed in time and space, and we are faced with a visual manifestation of the memory of presence.

Exhibitions

Solaris, Alma Zevi, 4th March - 15th April, 2017, Venice, Italy