For her first solo exhibition in Belgium, Mexican artist Tania Pérez Córdova (°1979) presents a series of works around ideas of translation, both of matter and meaning. How can a situation be built with scattered objects, with elements that have been deviated from their usual function? How can language be translated into object and vice versa? With a title evoking multiple possibilities, she cares about a certain "uncertainty" of things, their versatility.
Through subtle and transversal strategies, Pérez Córdova seems to render objects as abstract events, still remaining faithful to their formal and conceptual coordinates. The abandoned leftovers from a brass cast and a clay vase, as well as the fleeting meetings between cigarette ash and red lipstick, fruit stones and counterfeit coins, all tracing quiet equivalences between content and container… where is the boundary between the object's identity and its duplication?
The exhibition is a trail of objects scattered throughout the space, asking questions.This abnormally low placed fan, executing a hardly perceptible rotation, does not have its functionality anymore; does that turn it into "another object"? Could its mysterious slowness suggest an alternative to our expectation of time and duration, another pace?
There is a recurring clash between the artist´s quasi-performative approach to object-making, and her instinctive turning to rich and sculpturally-loaded materials such as ceramic, bronze and brass. A good example of this junction could be found in the works Person A and Person B, where two common SIM cards are unsettling slipped into two ceramic plates. The cards originate from two different telephones, and contain a voicemail conversation between their two owners. The two works exist in a disturbing silence, as if they were not yet deciphered antic tablets; the dialogues are probably embedded forever, but can potentially be reanimated and audible in the future.
Pérez Córdova cares about what stays imperceptible at first sight. She invites her audience to take her works for what they are: up-and-coming propositions. In this context it is significant that she invited Francesco Pedraglio to create a site specific intervention on the gallery front window. Developing a practice concerning the creation of narrations and potentialities of the real, Pedraglio gives a voice and a story to what he (as well as the audience) might see through the subjective perspective of a gallery’s window, framing potential stories as well as imposing abstract stage directions. Imagining what can be seen by anyone, but cannot be heard because of the distance, he rethink the real as a shared fabricated narrative. The works of both artists have a beautiful proximity in that they both choose and isolate situations and animate these, or even reanimate.