fernando arias
 
 
 

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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