Flavia Da Rin (Buenos Aires, 1978) very creatively and exhaustively explores the possibilities offered by the self-portrait in the digital era. With Who’s That Girl?, the Museo de Arte Moderno presents the first retrospective of a twenty year career during which she has been a leading light among Argentine artists of her generation.
Da Rin started out on the cusp of the new millennium, when the rapid development of technology saw virtual reality, chats, selfies and avatars begin to change the way in which we represent ourselves, making such concepts far more fluid than in the previous century. Using digital manipulation and enhancement, Da Rin merges self-portraits with complex, extremely expressive scenes. These tools have helped the artist to address a diverse range of issues across her twenty year career as she plays the role of numerous different characters. She explores femininity and social stereotypes, paying homage to women artists left out of canonical narratives of the history of art and reflecting on the difficulties of combining motherhood with an artistic career.
Her works are a catalogue of emotions expressed in the faces of different women who are also the artist herself. The power of the images lies in the tension between their personality and the stereotype, between the individual and the universal, the real and the virtual as they ask a series of questions: ‘Who do I want to be? What image or emotion can I make myself into? Who do I have inside of me, who do I consist of? Does a true self really exist? And who needs to be themselves when they can be so many others?’
Da Rin is the director, set designer and editor of her own work. Although she draws on fiction and modifies her image to the point that she is often unrecognizable, her work is keenly autobiographical, running through the lengthy gamut of emotions and thought processes that she has encountered at different moments in her life. Like a digital native, Flavia Da Rin explores the possibility of forever becoming someone else. With each change of skin she adds to a game of split subjectivities, transforming herself into an image that conveys different desires and fantasies, offering the freedom to be whoever you want to be.
Curated by: Laura Hakel
Flavia Da Rin (Buenos Aires, 1978) attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “Prilidiano Pueyrredón” for five years, specializing in painting. Simultaneous to her formal artistic education, she also began to teach herself photography, influenced by ‘trash pop’ aesthetics that took place along with the Y2K bug scare that preceded the subsequent global expansion of the internet. In 2001, she began to attend the workshop and clinics run by Diana Aisenberg. In 2002, her work was selected to be a part of the Currículum Cero competition (Galería Ruth Benzacar). Between 2003 and 2005, she took part in clinics run by Guillermo Kuitca as part of the Workshop Programme run by the Visual Arts Department at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (UBA- Kuitca). In 2003, she held her first solo exhibition at the Casona de los Olivera and then in 2004 exhibited for the first time at the Galería Ruth Benzacar.
This exhibition is suppported by
