artnexus #117

Tania Candiani (Mexico City, 1974) is interested in exploring language systems that appeal as much to visuality as to words, sound, or technology. Her work alludes to different social groups and the context in which they are immersed. With a rigorous investigative concern linked to archival practices, she interprets different historical moments from standpoints that reveal the persisting continuity of certain situations, in spite of all the many years that have elapsed.

This diversity of means, practices, and materials have led her to endorse an interdisciplinary work that engages different areas of knowledge.

Her interest in exploring allows her to establish a dialogue between image, literature, and sound design, rearranging them to propose other interpretive possibilities with which she constructs her critical thinking; a political stance that opens the door to other ways of looking, intersecting past and present.

In works such as Sounding Labor, Silent Bodies (2020), she exposes the mostly ignored and hidden labor work of women in nineteenth century Cincinnati’s factories; women excluded from the fruits of their efforts, allowing for a parallel with current struggles against gender inequality.

Camouflage (2020), displayed on the cover of this issue, is inspired by the series of photographs taken by the North American photojournalist Dorothea Lange, who after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, recorded the confinement of Japanese-American in more than ten concentration camps. From these images, Candiani recreates the camouflage nets that detained women were forced to weave for the concealment of various weapons of war. At Frieze Art Fair, the artist established a parallel between the forced labor of Japanese-American women and what detainees on the border between Mexico and the United States are subjected to today.

IVONNE PINI