Untitled
Fernando Arias
2002
The installations and performances of the Columbian artist Fernando
Arias explore issues around HIV, the social and gendered body, contamination
and purity.
His work has included photos around the theme of personal hygiene
which confront the viewer with the marks produced by the act of
wiping the body clean. These photos then function as signs of defilement
even as they illustrate the process of cleansing. For Hygiene, Arias
presents the banal object of the roll of toilet paper as a comment
on the both the pretensions of art and the attempts to refuse the
abject body. The loo roll, casually deployed, demonstrates an anti-aesthetic
and throw-away attitude to inclusion in the 'body' of the exhibition.
This abnegation then resonates with the toilet roll as thing. It's
function comments on our uneasy relation to the excreted, abnegated,
thrown away; all that is our own excrement.
Arias represented Columbia in the Venice Biennale in 1999 and his
work has been exhibited throughout Latin America and Europe. For
more information please write to fernandoarias1@hotmail.com
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updated 27.11.02 | site designed and maintained by Adrian
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