Iris Helena
João Pessoa
September 2-30, 2021
Curated by Luna Goldberg
sponsored by Carlo and Micòl Schejola Foundation
BIO
Iris Helena, born in João Pessoa, Brazil (1987), holds a degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s in Contemporary Poetics from the Fine Arts department at the Universidade de Brasília/Brazil. Her work is often characterized by a critical and poetic investigation of the city and urban landscape. She uses objects/surfaces removed from daily consumption within a range of different artistic approaches, such as photography and installation.Helena’s research focuses on a critical, philosophical, aesthetic and poetic investigation of the urban landscape from a dialogical approach between the image of the city and the surfaces chosen to materialize it. The precarious and ordinary surfaces are often removed from their daily consumption and enable the construction / reconstruction of memory linked to risk, instability and, above all, to the desire for erasure.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In my practice, I am very interested in thinking about ruin not only as destruction, but as transformation of an idea and of a material in order to make room for something else to happen. I think this is where my interest in monuments lies as well. I work with the idea of memory, forgetting, risk, erasure, and how ruins serve as a kind of souvenir, often through the medium of photography and printing across different surfaces.
In my work on monuments, I have been thinking about resizing them to ridiculous proportions and the possibility of reimagining them according to non-hegemonic historical readings.
For a possible project at The Fountainhead, I have been thinking a lot about developing works that examine Brazilian cultural institutional relations as a ruin. We are without a ministry of culture, museums without money, without basic investments due to the fascist directions that the Brazilian government has taken following the echoes of the last American government.
ARTIST LINKS
Website: www.irishelena.net
Instagram: @iris.helena