Mercedes Azpilicueta: Body Birds

Mercedes Azpilicueta investigates the less visible meaning of expression, that place where the word is overwhelmed by its own resources of voice and speaking: tone, gesture and breathing. In this exhibition, we bring together sound pieces and video installations in which the artist works upon the affectivity that circulates through the medium of language, but also upon the control and violence that are exercised through it. Azpilicueta is interested in the living and changing aspects of speaking, those which reflect the personal and local ways of expression.

Cuerpos pájaros (Body-Birds) is a work produced especially for this exhibition. In this video installation, filmed on dérives through the streets of Buenos Aires, the artist asks what is a collective body, formed of many parts, diverse and demystified, and not subject to normativity.

Azplilicueta inquires into the social structures that shape our behavior, and then disassembles them with the expressiveness of her body and the power of her voice. Created amid a restless shifting between languages, cities, and cultural codes, her works are a poetic response to the norms that condition what we say, how we behave, and how we inhabit our bodies.

Mercedes Azpilicueta was born in La Plata in 1981 and grew up in Coronel Suárez, in the province of Buenos Aires. From 2002 to 2007, she completed her Bachelor´s Degree in Visual Arts at the Instituto Universitario Nacional de Artes de Buenos Aires. Afterwards, in 2009, she participated in the Artists Programs of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, in which she took clinics with Jorge Macchi, Mónica Girón and Alejandro Cesarco, among others. During those years, she also participated in poetry and writing workshops with Mariano Blatt and Alfredo Jaramillo. In 2011, she traveled to the Netherlands to take a Masters at the Dutch Art Institute/ArteEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, of Arnhem, and moved to that country. During 2015 and 2016, she was selected as artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, in Amsterdam, where she currently live and works. In 2017, she received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship grant, thanks to which she undertook a residency in Villa Vassilieff/Bétonsalon – CentreR d’art et de recherche, of Paris. In the last few years, she presented her works and performance in TENT (Rotterdam, 2015), Onomatopee (Eindhoven, 2016), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Móstoles, 2017), Museion (Bozen, 2018), MACBA (Barcelona, 2018), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, 2018), Villa Vassilieff (Paris, 2018), Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Getty Foundation and REDCAT/CalArts Gallery (Los Angeles, 2018), among others. Her solo exhibitions include: Todo afuera adentro, at Móvil (Buenos Aires, 2015); Geometric Dancer Doesn’t Believe in Love, Finds Aspiration and Ecstasy in Spirals, at SlyZmud (Buenos Aires, 2016), and On Affection, in Nogueras Blanchard (Barcelona, 2017). Cuerpos pájaros is the first large-scale overview of her work.

This exhibition is suppported by