Studio visits (online) Mercedes Azpilicueta

As an extension of the monthly studio visit program, Stroom initiated the Digital Dialogues program, in which artists from The Hague engage in an online conversation with an interesting artist, writer or curator.You can now sign up for the second edition with visual artist Mercedes Azpilicueta.

On Tuesday 23 June and Thursday 25 June, artist Mercedes Azpilicueta will have conversations via Skype with artists in The Hague about their art practice.For her areas of interest, please refer to her brief biography:

Short biography
Mercedes Azpilicueta (born in La Plata, Argentina in 1981) is a visual and performance artist living and working in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires. Her artistic practice brings together various characters from the past and the present, who manifest as voices, shapes, texts, traces and memories into her multi-layered works. Calling herself a "dishonest researcher", Azpilicueta navigates through multiple references and fields of knowledge, from art history to popular music, literature to street culture, falling in love with dissident figures and trajectories — feminist, queer, migrant, exiled individuals — who haunt her scripts, performances and videos. Yet, her work never indulges into cold reverence or archival fascination. By engaging the body with all its flaws and potentials — her own body, that of her muses and collaborators, that of the spectators, but also fantasized ones — Azpilicueta embraces its fragility as well as its capacity for resistance and care.

Sign up
Als je geïnteresseerd bent in een online gesprek over je werk en kunstenaarspraktijk met Mercedes Azpilicueta, dan kun je dat t/m vrijdag 12 juni, 13.00 uur 2020 laten weten. De binnengekomen reacties worden samen met eventuele suggesties vanuit Stroom aan Mercedes Azpilicueta voorgelegd, waarna zij een keuze zal maken. De gesprekken vinden plaats via Skype en er is beperkte beschikbaarheid, wees dus snel met je aanmelding. Je ontvangt alleen een bericht wanneer je door de kunstenaar bent geselecteerd voor een online gesprek.

Follow up biography
Most specifically known for her performance and video work, Mercedes Azpilicueta has recently started to develop a new turn in her practice, exploring the theatrical possibilities of sculpture and installation. However, the objects that she produces should not be taken for granted, as they always bear the potential of being activated in various ways. They could be translated as scores, set designs, props, mnemonic devices or records — disguised as sculptures. They often take different functions according to their context of appearance and travel merrily from one work to another. The fabrication of these objects often involves "poor", craft-based or handmade techniques that are often associated with the domestic work of women and with subaltern knowledge, such as sewing, embroidering or dying. The materials are either recycled or natural (latex, leather, silk, wax) and add another layer of stories to the objects, that of the circulation of resources and knowledge often acquired through the violent exploitation of humans and nature.

In 2018 she presented her first major solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. She received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship, Paris, in 2017 and was artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van de Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 2015-16. She has an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute/ArtEZ, Arnhem (2013), and a BFA from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires (2007); where she also took the Artists' Program 2009-10 at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. She has exhibited her work at MUSEION - Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Bolzano 2020), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, 2019), CentroCentro (Madrid, 2019), REDCAT Gallery (Los Angeles, 2018), MACBA (Barcelona, 2018), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Móstoles, 2017), Onomatopee (Eindhoven, 2016), TENT (Rotterdam, 2015), Móvil (Buenos Aires, 2015), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2014) and Het Veem Theatre (Amsterdam, 2014). She is currently exhibiting her work at the TextielMuseum, Tilburg. Forthcoming exhibitions include Lunds Konsthall and CAC Brétigny.