MADRID.- Sabrina Amrani is presenting Superposición, Paloma Polo‘s first exhibition at the gallery.
Reality and fiction become analogous spheres whenever one casts a critical eye over history —and even science. They operate as parallel dimensions of a symbolic constellation that affects the production of knowledge grounded on specific sociopolitical contexts. Thoroughly invested in an endeavor of both speculation and historic rigueur, the present exhibition is the result of an “unequal accumulation of time” (Milton Santos). Overlapping layers of history and nature, scientific matter and symbolic culture, a variety of data sedimented on glass, photography, paper and celluloid contest and critically inquire into the all-so-many worlds that separate humankind from nature, nature from culture, and reality from fiction, thus setting aside diverse cultures and their respective cosmologies.
The works of Paloma Polo in this exhibition are extracts, exhibits and re-enactments of a faulty or impaired vision of the world —a secluded one, remote from the perspective of the local population in the non-Western sites where most eclipses have been observed since the 19th century, or even from the vantage point of ordinary man and woman in the very heart of the mistakenly called Old World. Those pieces refer to the apparatus of knowledge developed afar from the diversity of co-existing cosmologies, insofar as it seizes nature under the dome of convention and rule, subordinated to axiomatic notions of economic progress and technological advancement.
None of the works presented in this exhibition are unified in their respective immanence. Quite the opposite, in fact, they appear in a veiled state of frailty, demanding from the public an inquisitive attitude towards their very existence in the world. In their incompleteness, they prompt repositioning and reframing as a political act for rethinking modes of totality.
Paloma Polo is a Spanish artist and independent researcher based in Utrecht. Between 2007- 2009 she attended De Ateliers art residency program (Amsterdam) and in 2010 the Gasworks residency program (London). In 2013 she was tenured as a visiting research fellow at the Center for International Studies, University of the Philippines Diliman, Manila. Her later research explorations were hosted in by Les Laboratoires D’Aubervilliers research and creation institution (Paris). Polo is one of the driving forces of the organization Moving Artists International, and a member of the International League of Peoples’ Struggles (ILPS).
Delving into past events or probing into on-going conflicts, Paloma Polo’s endeavors have progressed alongside a continuing immersion in zones of unrest. It is from the side and the agency of the people in struggle, in the battleground of emancipatory revolutionary processes, that she has situated her investigations. Her proposition is to devise and stage a narrative, a script, that captures the emergence of political thought in the people, in order to explore social configurations as preconditions or potentialities for political change. Such an inquiry entails paying heed to worldviews that are violently suppressed in the making and normalization of political categories, even emancipatory ones, and has led her to observe social dimensions of concrete struggles that are rendered invisible and remain unrecognized. Storytelling and fictional speculations, materialized audio-visually, are, in her work, a tentative means to fathom the remolding of social relations in their contradictory movements.
She has exhibited her work individually at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo- CA2M (Madrid), Arts Catalyst (London), Casa Barragan (Mexico City), Frieze Art Fair (London), Montehermoso Cultural Centre (Vitoria) and SKOR Foundation for Art and Public Domain (Amsterdam) among other venues. Her work has been featured at the International Exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennial, Turner Contemporary (Kent), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (México), High Line Art (New York), Le Commun.Bâtiment d'art Contemporain (Geneva), Stedelijk Hertogenbosch Museum (Den Bosch), Celje Regional Museum, (Slovenia), Artium Museum (Vitoria) or CGAC, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago de Compostela) among others. Her works are hosted in prominent collections as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo- CA2M (Madrid), Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago de Compostela), Centro Botín y Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (León).
