Florencia Sadir: Offering to the Sun

The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires is honoured to present Ofrenda al sol [Offering to the Sun], by Florencia Sadir (Cafayate, 1991), originally conceived for the Aichi Triennale 2022  in Japan, but only recently produced with support from the Museo Moderno for this exhibition.

Florencia Sadir’s work arises out of her keen, sensitive gaze on the territory. It is particularly concerned with the historical knowledge developed by the communities of the Calchaquí Valleys, particularly those of the village of San Carlos, where Sadir lives, the oldest in Salta and a cradle of local crafts. Her practice – which we know through installations, sculptures and drawings – highlights the ways natural materials are so transformed by ancestral technologies that, on coming into contact with heat, humidity or wind, they become pottery, adobe or fertile soil for cultivation. Their production contributes to the building of home and hearth, to the preservation and cooking of food, to the transfer of water or to shelter.

Sadir’s work, however, seeks to deflect these processes from their functional nature and to exhibit these objects’ forms in the raw: equipped with a minimalist outlook and faithful to her conceptual background, Sadir has, in her short but thriving career, created stripped-down installations to reveal orders, textures, patterns and methods.

Ofrenda al sol is Sadir’s most recent installation and the first in which fantasy predominates. Animated by the prospect that blind production processes open up to the imagination – a reference to the rich material life that develops beneath the surface and to the process of firing and charring the ceramics in a sealed kiln – Sadir has given form to imaginary beings that rise up shoot-like out of a charcoal floor, the heat source that has made possible their consolidation as sculptures. Standing upon this black mantle, whose shape recalls the whimsical drawings that echo the divisions of crops and property, these sculptures inform us about the magic of their material nature and exhibit the knowledge that has shaped them.

Florencia Sadir was born in Tucuman in 1991 but grew up in Cafayate, Salta. She now lives nearby, in a small village called San Carlos. It is both her place of work and where she continues to learn ancestral knowledge about the earth, crops and ceramics. 

She is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts of the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, where she also attended the Taller C workshop. She completed the Escuela Flora Ars + Natura study programme in Bogotá, Colombia in 2019 as well as the 2020-2021 Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Artists’ Programme in Buenos Aires. Over the course of these studies, she pursued investigations into materials that originate from the earth and the ancestral knowledge of the area where she lives. Florencia reformulates materials and utilitarian pieces using abstraction and she works with the surrounding space to produce different types of sculptures and installations.

In July 2022, she participated in “Still Alive”, the 5th Edition of the Aichi Triennale in Tokoname, Japan, directed by Mami Kataoka. In November of that same year, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires hosted her first solo exhibition at a museum in the city, Florencia Sadir: Ofrenda al sol [Florencia Sadir: Offering to the Sun]. In 2021, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Salta hosted her exhibition, Todavía las cosas hacían sombra [Things Still Cast a Shadow] and, in 2018, the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires held her exhibition, Un lugar sin nombre [A place Without a Name]. She has also participated in group exhibitions, such as Trazar sobre el suelo el contorno de la polvareda [Trace the Outline of the Dust on the Ground] (2021), at the Museo Jallpha Kalchakí in San Carlos, Salta; Adentro no hay más que una morada [Within There is but One Abode] (2021), at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, and Gualicho (2022) at Galería Revolver, Buenos Aires.

In 2023, she was invited to participate in the FAARA artists residency at the Fundación Ama Amoedo in José Ignacio, Uruguay. She was a finalist for the Azcuy Award (2020) and a recipient of the Creation Grant of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (2019), and was the 2017 artist-in-residence at URRA Tigre (Buenos Aires) and recipient of the 2016 Curadora residency (Santa Fe). Her works are part of the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and are also held in private collections in Argentina, Chile and Colombia. From 2015 to 2018, she participated in the Lateral project in Tucumán, where she worked as a co-director and co-producer of activities that aimed to promote contemporary art in the province through exhibitions, workshops and other activities with artists, curators and theorists.

Curator: Alejandra Aguado, Clarisa Appendino