Editor’s Pick
“Seemingly caught between collapse and ascension, Berenice Olmedo’s work feels like an ode to both pain and resilience. “I want to reorganize another possibility of the body” she said at the talk presenting her first museum show in the United States, a must see for transhumanist tinkerers. What does a body become when it has no choice but to adapt? Olmedo turns prosthetics, scoliosis corsages, braces, and orthopedic devices into buttery effigies that both swagger and hesitate. Luminous, precarious, alive and bruised, these sculptures expand standardized expectations of bodies.”
-Inga Bard
About the Exhibition
MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo: To ti ên einai is the first US museum exhibition of the work of artist Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico; lives and works in Mexico City). Working across sculpture, performance, and kinetic installation, Olmedo is known for her anthropomorphic assemblages with fused prostheses and orthotics. Her intimate yet commanding freestanding figures and wall-based installations urge a reconsideration of standardized expectations of bodies. As the artist wrote, “There is no stigma of disability in the world I propose, but only variations of existence, variations of movement, variations on slowness and speed.”
To craft her amalgamated beings, OImedo casts medical plastics, armatures, and implants, joining prosthetic arm and leg sockets, scoliosis corsages, and collars to create works that transcend the specificities of her references. Rather than incorporate orthopedic devices as found objects, her sculptures define themselves through the conjunction of their parts and the freedom of their own completion. The title of the exhibition, To ti ên einai, is taken from a phrase written by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Translated from Greek as “the what it was to be,” this philosophical concept indicates that a being contains the entire history of how it came to be, even as it changes over time. Olmedo’s luminous and powerful forms likewise offer profound meditations on the simultaneous fragility and resiliency of life.