multidisciplinary artist
"I see strong ritualistic aspects in her work; for example in her performances, when she chew coal and make a reference to the Aztec Goddess [..Tlazolteotl..] which eats dirt; this is a (process) where she puts herself into a painful or a discomfort situation in order to reshape herself or to reinvent herself
...we all have to reinvent ourselves, that's why we search or create a space that I call "Inbetweeness"... and this is a highly political act.
I see in her art practice the wish or urge to find new knowledge, to create new knowledge (and) to find an old language, an old knowledge, some sort of archaeological act to deconstruct things again.
In the aspects of the night and the time, the act of creating her own time, her own rhythm is also a search for autonomy. It's like breathing, we can create our own (way of) breathing. When we create our own breath, we create our own time, our own (knowledge?)... then we are on the path to autonomy.
Curators talk in the frame of the exhibition "In Search of the Lost Unity"
Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein
Art historian, curator and head the Department of Art and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
"In her series of autobiographical performances with charcoal (s./t. series), the artist Guadalupe Aldrete embodies a paradoxical image of both the fragile and enduring feminine body. In an exhausting process of piling up the black material, she configures an emotionally overwhelming scene in which the fictional world of personal memories becomes a semantic and affective trigger to reflect on the social context of invisible (migrant) bodies. At the same time, this constellation might bring to our attention the condition of precarious labor, which is not only related to hard physical labor (such as the work in coal mines in the “Third world” for example), but becomes a worrying and threatening prognosis for artists and cultural workers as well. From a historical perspective, Nomada seems to expose a discoursive context for the reexamination of the dark sides of modernity, especially in its relation with the colonial power and the suppression of women. Emotionally challenging and thought provoking, these performances at the same time invite the audience to engage in an ethical dialogue, which involves their stepping out of the safe zone of aesthetic distance and initiates the possibility of direct involvement with the living bodies of others."
Curator of the 18th Pancevo Biennale and lecturer at
the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)