Page 59 - "he 2020 Guggenheim issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

AZUCENA VIEIT

Azucena Vieites, A World, 2020. Acrylic on paper, cardboard, print on paper, silkscreen on paper
Installation view (detail), 11th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 5.9.–1.11.2020
Courtesy Azucena Vieites. Photo: Silke Brie

As the cofounder of the Erreakzioa-Reacción collective and femzine,
Azucena Vieites works with editing processes that cut across all
her media. Drawings, texts, publications, serigraphs, and papers
are taped to the walls or placed in glass cases, borrowing from the
seriality of minimalist practices. Overlapping, repeating, torn into
fragments, Vieites’ combinations of images and text are poised
between meaning and noise, between abstract and referential. From
big sheets to tiny drawings, from large installations to hand-held
zines, her free play with scale and materials parallels the feminist
politics of not differentiating between personal and political or
private and public: small can be big. Vieites’ longstanding alliance
to queer feminist politics and associated subcultures is referenced
in her work and underscored by her DIY/copy-shop aesthetic.
Accordingly, her practice is open and collaborative, especially in the
context of her interests in publishing and the uninhibited attitudes
of children towards gender roles. Many of her exhibitions are
accompanied by workshops that she conducts with children, who
both produce their own images and color in her drawings. She also
creates zines with them. In A World (2020) Vieites ... (excerpt)

BRENDA V. FA JARDO

Brenda V. Fajardo, Installation view, 11th Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art,
5.9.–1.11.2020. Photo: Silke Briel

Brenda V. Fajardo is best known for her complex works on paper
that intertwine the social and political realities of the Philippines.
Some of her finest works present their iconography within the
schema of the tarot—a central image is bordered with a reading
of the event, in which the artist divines the outcome and its
possibilities. Appropriating the original tarot symbolism into a deck
of images she calls Baraha ng Buhay Pilipino (Cards of the Lives
of the Filipinos), Fajardo embeds the imagery within the local and
power within the feminine.
Layered with gold leaf, the early works in Fajardo’s tarot series focus
on the Filipino people and their plight, particularly that of women.
Fajardo frequently includes the names of specific individuals in
her titles, integrating these into the narratives that she writes as a
backdrop to the pieces. This act of naming absolves Fajardo’s works
from simply being representative of circumstances and events;
instead each becomes an individuated experience. This group of
works seems to have foretold the troubles in the Philippines, which
continue to this day. Take, for example, the work Siya ang Dragon
ng Kadiliman at Kasinungalingan-Gahaman [He is the Dragon of
Darkness and Lies – Avaricious, 2018], which was first drawn in 2000,
the year of the Metal Dragon. In this “reading” Fajardo divines the
destiny of the Philippines at the turn of the century, ... (excerpt)

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