EXPOSICIONES INDIVIDUALES
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No new tale to tell, 1994 - 1999
2017
No New Tale To Tell 1994-1999 nació de la exploración del archivo de Andrea Ferreyra. Carpetas, hojas de contacto, cuadernos de trabajo y demás materiales, vislumbraban posibilidades de crear una exposición. Durante este acomodo se encontró obra que no había sido mostrada, documentación de procesos, imágenes u objetos que servían a un propósito específico durante una acción, pero que aún alejadas de su contexto original seguían teniendo sentido y mucho potencial.
Durante los noventa, al principio de su práctica artística, Ferreyra formó parte de una rica escena del performance que usaba el medio para subvertir la figura del objeto artístico, para escapar de las convenciones objetuales del arte y hacer una crítica más incisiva de la realidad que se desarrollaba en nuestro país.
Ahora, más de veinte años después, es casi irónico que esta exposición que revisa ese periodo de tiempo, se conforme de los objetos residuos de las acciones, fotografías que documentaban o apoyaban los performances y obra bidimensional que la artista continuó produciendo a pesar de la postura performática.
Eventualmente la obra de Ferreyra se desplazaría radicalmente, su búsqueda personal la fue adentrando a otros terrenos donde ya no se buscaba hacer una acto con un público que acudía específicamente a verlo, los intereses de Ferreyra se colaron en el terreno del Situacionismo, la intervención de medios y la confusión y mezcla de la realidad y la ficción; estos elementos que son clarísimos en su obra más tardía, se empiezan a vislumbrar en las obras aquí presentadas: los registros de piezas nos hablan de una necesidad de salirse del campo de acción del performance y el uso del espacio público. En las obras vemos a Ferreyra utilizar la expectativa, el lenguaje y los objetos más ordinarios para alterar su significado, con ellos rompe y pone en tela de juicio la dictadura de la vida cotidiana y su mediocridad apática, el deseo como una mercancía vulgar o el consumo chatarra y sus nexos con la asqueante realidad de un país más preocupado por la vida del vecino que por lo que pasa en su propia casa.
Esta muestra nos habla de un presente perenne, inmutable y continuo. No hay nada nuevo que contar porque no hay nada nuevo bajo el sol. Los comentarios al margen o directos, que hace Andrea Ferreyra siguen siendo vigentes hasta el día de hoy, siempre desde el humor (porque qué otra cosa nos queda más que reír) desde la navaja afilada del sarcasmo que a su vez nos habla de algo muy serio.
La obra de Andrea Ferreyra invita a reflexionar esos casi imperceptibles momentos de libertinaje dentro de la vida común, de lo desagradable y sus posibilidades subversivas, de mantener un espíritu rebelde, porque el mundo me hizo así, y si bien esta exposición es profundamente ácida, es gracias a ese malestar que nos ponemos a cuestionar la realidad y la pertinencia de nuestros actos.
Laos Salazar, 2017
No New Tale To Tell, 1994-1999 was born out of an exploration of Andrea Ferreyra's archives. Folders, contact sheets, working notebooks and other materials glimmered as possibilities for making an exhibition. During this arrangement we encountered work that had never been shown, documentation of working processes, and images or objects that served specific purposes during actions but that, even when removed from their original context, were still charged with meaning and potential.
During the nineties, at the beginning of her artistic practice, Ferreyra was part of a rich performance scene that used the medium to subvert the figure of the art object, to escape its conventions, and to make a more incisive critique of the evolving reality in our country.
Now, more than twenty years later, it’s almost ironic that this exhibition revisiting that period be composed of residual objects from the actions, photographs that documented or expanded upon the performances, and two-dimensional work that the artist has continued to produce despite her performative posture.
Eventually, Ferreyra's work would shift radically, her personal exploration took her into other terrains where she no longer sought to perform an act with an audience that came specifically to see her—Ferreyra's interests began to encroach upon the territory of Situationism, interventions into different media, and the confusion and mixing of reality and fiction. These elements, very clearly seen in her later work, are glimpsed in the works presented here: the records of these pieces tell us of a need to go beyond the scope of performance and the use of public space. In the works we see Ferreyra utilize expectations, language, and the most ordinary objects in ways that alter their meaning, questioning and breaking apart the dictatorship of everyday life and its apathetic mediocrity—desire as a vulgar commodity or junk consumption and its nexus with the nauseating reality of a country more concerned with the lives of its neighbors than with what’s happening inside its own house.
This exhibition speaks to us of a perennial, immutable and continuous present. There’s nothing new to tell because there’s nothing new under the sun. The comments, direct or in the margins, that Ferreyra makes are still valid today, and they are always made with humor (because what else can we do but laugh), with the sharp edge of a sarcasm that at the same time speaks to us about something very serious.
Andrea Ferreyra's work invites us to reflect upon those almost imperceptible moments of depravity hidden within ordinary life, on the unpleasant and its subversive possibilities, on maintaining a rebellious spirit—because the world made me this way—and even if this exhibition is deeply acid, it is thanks to that malaise that it causes us to question reality and the relevance of our actions.
Laos Salazar, 2017
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Marienbad
2016
For the piece Cartas [Letters], there were five speakers in the room, each with a different voice. Each voice represented a frequent sender of the envelopes that were mounted on the wall. You could hear all five voices simultaneously, but as you approached each speaker you could distinguish each one individually.
I performed automatic writing across an entire roll of toilet paper, reflecting on how we used to write by hand, how we stored information, how it became an event that some friend had bought the latest album by whatever band and that we were there to listen to it as if it were the premiere. I remembered how we would bring cassettes to record a copy of the album for ourselves, I also remembered recording music from the radio. I reflected on postcards, on the obsolete media and devices that can be seen in the exhibition, on the ephemeral and the permanent.
The digitized VHS videos were projected at very high speed so that the multiple hours of material could be seen.
The house occupied by Ladrón gallery was the perfect setting. In a storage room, a slide projector was showing samples of visual work that I made during art school. The slides, in some cases, are all that remains of those pieces. Sculptures, drawings, enamels and paintings could be seen, precisely the kind of work that was never associated with my career. Some of it was never shown and many pieces were given away or lost over time.
The day of the inauguration I performed a sound improvisation: I read fragments of letters and the reflections on media that I had written on the toilet paper. Adding to my voice, I incorporated the theremin.
In a bonfire that could be seen from below, I burned some of the personal letters belonging to the piece Cartas.
MARIENBAD
Andrea Ferreyra
If you, dear reader, decide to venture out on the simplest odyssey of searching the word “work” on the internet, the first thing that the most recognized search engine in digital space is going to throw straight at your iris is a map. One with the exact addresses of certain services dedicated to the commercialization of work; job centers, employment offices, government agencies and several of those state schools specialized in training for technical careers. Below this fantastic cartography, we get into a long list of job offers and platforms, and, not too surprisingly, we find that it isn’t until the middle of the second page that we are confronted with the first definition—offered by Wikipedia—of the concept “work.” It’s not even relevant to discuss why it might be more important for the search engine to offer us the thing before offering us an understanding of it, I suppose it’s an act of social normativity.
An artist’s production, that of those who are truly artists according to modern tradition, maintains the elaboration of aesthetic, poetic, or visual products at the epicenter of their practice. Work that, beyond all the discourses and value judgments instituted, imposed, or acquired, has the credulous intention of putting bread on the table, to sum up the operation in its simplest form. The value of artistic work would seem to be measured only within a dialectical materialism, it being understood that its only function is its role as a facilitator of palpably profitable opportunities for the artist in the form of symbolic or economic capital.
In the film Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) an attempt is made to negotiate a chronicle of overwhelmingly amorous memories, lost in a non-time which places substances in a vortex of convergences lost between memory and the moment.
The film obstructs reality without denying it, invoking the viewer to construct—or fail in the attempt to construct—a story (by necessity), out of what is observed. The distance between the constructions of desire and truth become insignificant, yet they are more distant than ever, in the inexhaustible cycle of a taciturn encounter, in the labyrinth of romance and the perverse. In her exhibition Marienbad, Ferreyra also lashes out against a logical neutrality and attempts to de/construct her own narrative (and thus her place in the social sphere), by interweaving the suffocating idea that years and years and years of immaterial labor deposited in artistic work might melt into immateriality—rooted in the melancholy of survival in this monstrous city, in this maniacal world. Andrea takes up this epic fiction of life and work from a performative and self-marginalizing point of view, re-inserting her own body of work as a statute that flirts with the imaginary of liberal politics—an imaginary deeply linked to her being, to the extent that it provoked her and her family's political exile from Uruguay in 1978 and produced the exacerbated nostalgia for the very whirlwind of fixations and sorrows that we call existence.
Fortunately, here we are not concerned with the value given to an object for its economic, cultural, social potential or its insertion in a structure of thought that demands novelty as a paradigm. What interests us here is breaking the game of representation, reinforcing the symbiosis of reality and fiction, of affliction and question. May you too, like Andrea and the living memories of Marienbad, polemicize the why, what, and for what of your torments.
Marek Wolfryd.
1.Her first solo show after a financially draining but spiritually enriching editorial project that took her four and a half years to complete (plus one year of recuperation).
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Las amigas pobres de Barbie
La Panadería. México, D.F.
1999
Illuminated Dolls.
By: Itala Schmelz Herner.
Under the title Barbie’ Poor Friends, Andrea Ferreyra exhibits a series of lamps made of dolls at la Panadería—each lamp is a doll. With this work the artist claims to have recovered her taste for making objects and, in this sense her visual exploration with light and color is remarkable, light and color not used as pictorial elements, but in the creation of light objects—lamps—and in the use of color through materials found in stationery store displays and market stalls. Stickers, glitter, sequins, plastic beads, nails and false eyelashes are some of the materials and garish knickknacks with which she has devoted herself to dressing, combing and decorating her dolls, reviving that childhood activity. But, if we observe closely, behind the infantile game a perverse—or, at least, perverting—conscience of things reveals itself.
The fundamental activity of the “I” that we all carry “inside” is the search for identity—the “I” is essentially a search for oneself. Mass society has generated an ample market through which the most unusual consumer products circulate. If we look at them closely, their image is charged with discourses or models of identity that haunt this search for the “I”. Contemporary artists have been characterized by generating, in diverse manners, strategies of escape, defense or attack against this coercive network of identity. To this effort we can add the works of Andrea Ferreyra. Her pieces have the audacity to show the absurd side of a herd-mentality discourse. Facing the mirror, her dolls find a mocking and cruel image of themselves reflected. The ironic and amusing compositions of these lamps subvert the meaning of market products, giving a novel enunciation to their semantic charges.
Barbie’ Poor Friends come to life when illuminated, the light feeds their colors and, thus, each one reveals the feminine role she represents: La Secre, with her sensual dress made of fake nails, La Fodonguex covered in cotton balls and with a Tampax headdress on her head. La Curada, covered with band-aids, the woman who mutilates herself, whose body is wounded; or la Modelo Pasivo-agresiva who, in a mirrored costume, reflects so as not to be seen and, at the same time, conceals sharp razors. There is also la Pendejuela, with her tight-fitting sequined dress, who allows herself to be fascinated by false illuminations.
A ceiling lamp, whose wide shade is a creamy tulle dress, represents la Quinceañera—a dreamy little doll. The workmanship of this lamp is so fanciful in its detail that if it were not the Quinceañera's dress, it might well be her cake, complete with meringue frills.
Tied to a sewing machine as if it were the prow of a ship, a doll-mermaid, la Soñadora, receives illumination from a faucet; the construction of this lamp recalls the diction of surrealist objects. For its part, la Rasputina, a doll-flower threatened by poisonous animals, is a gesture that alters the prevailing forms of kitsch; a bit of venom intervenes against the naivety that accepts these models as an aesthetic solution for everyday life in thousands of homes.
The lamp Inteligente is a sort of open book from which emerges a mature and masculine woman with green skin, a witch with birds coming out of her head. Here the light becomes a metaphor of illumination, of thoughts and ideas—magic and powerful light.
Unlike Barbie, who is the model of identity that comes from the hegemonic center and promotes the “American way of life”, her poor friends, each with her own personality and attitude towards life, make us reflect that the confection of identity is a complex and diverse process that cannot be reduced to the impositions of the market.
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