MARIA JOSE ARJONA
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
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Expanding the parameters of feminist artivism
2022
Springer International Publishing
Jennifer Burris
This book explores the work and careers of women, trans, and third-gender artists engaged in political activism. While some artists negotiated their own political status in their indigenous communities, others responded to global issues of military dictatorship, racial discrimination, or masculine privilege in regions other than their own. Women, trans, and third-gender artists continue to highlight and challenge the disturbing legacies of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, communism, and other political ideologies that are correlated with patriarchy, primogeniture, sexism, or misogyny. The book argues that solidarity among such artists remains valuable and empowering for those who still seek legitimate recognition in art schools, cultural institutions, and the history curriculum.
Gillian Hannum is Professor Emerita of Visual Studies and Art History at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, where she served on the faculty from 1987 to 2021. A photographic historian with M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from The Pennsylvania State University, she has published on photographic topics in the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society, History of Photography, and Nineteenth Century, has contributed to several books and exhibition catalogs, and has presented papers or chaired panels at a number of conferences
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Book of the exhibition Hay que se saber infinito, by Maria José Arjona, which shows twenty years of the work of this performance artist. Moreno explored the processes of change from the exterior to the interior, from darkness to light, and from the concrete to the ephemeral. Sculptural objects, live actions, photographs, videos, installations, and sound works are presented in dialogue with fragments of text that fluctuate from the metaphorical to the literal.
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To begin to understand the practice of María José Arjona (Bogotá, 1973), one must experience it in person, in body, flesh and blood. It brings together a polyphony of things, processes, habits, relationalities, affectivities and gestures that become invisible architectures —or rather, made invisible by our lack of attention due to an overdose of stimuli that we receive from neoliberal devices. Being from the mountains, Arjona is a force capable of overthrowing these stimuli not through noisy protests but through subversive gestures of resistance that invite us to slow down our schizophrenic tempos.
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How does the production of performance engage with the fundamental issues of our advanced neo-capitalist age?
André Lepecki surveys a decade of experimental choreography to uncover the dual meaning of ‘performance’ in the twenty-first century: not just an aesthetic category, but a mode of political power. He demonstrates the enduring ability of performance to critique and subvert this power, examining this relationship through five ‘singularities’ in contemporary dance: thingness, animality, persistence, darkness, and solidity.
Exploring the works of Mette Ingvartsen, Yvonne Rainer, Ralph Lemon, Jérôme Bel and others, Lepecki uses his concept of ‘singularity’—the resistance of categorization and aesthetic identification—to examine the function of dance and performance in political and artistic debate.
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The sounding body
2017
Collection of Contemporary Art
Jose Roca, Sylvia Suarez & Andre Lepecki
This book reviews some of the most relevant works from the artist, with texts from Andre Lepecki, Sylvia Suarez and Jose Roca.
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The LARA project invites eight artists every year to participate in a two-week residency in a specific place in a Latin American country. Based on these experiences, they produce several pieces that are presented in a collective exhibition that takes place six months later. Subsequently, two artists from each edition are selected to carry out an additional residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines, as well as at FLORA ars+natura, in Bogotá, Colombia. On this occasion, the Center for Contemporary Art in Quito presents the result of the residency that took place in March 2016 on the Santa Cruz and Isabela islands, in the Galapagos archipelago, Ecuador.
On this occasion, the artists María José Arjona (Colombia), Emilia Azcárate (Venezuela), Adrián Balseca (Ecuador), Pablo Cardoso (Ecuador), Matías Duville (Argentina), Manuela Ribadeneira (Ecuador) and Paula de Solminihac (Chile) participated. They are joined by Florencia Guillén (Mexico) who was part of the 2014 edition and earlier this year did her residency in the Philippines.
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We can still agree with Spinoza that we do not "know what a body can" (ctd. in Deleuze 59). The idea of thinking about it, measuring it, explaining it, charging it with meaning is recurrent, it can be said that it is a “fashionable” topic. However, thinking from the body, and not about it, is still an unfinished task. Surely the philosopher did not think of a solution beyond the written one, but his bet today opens multiple suggestions to the plastic arts, especially those that involve the physical presence of the artist in the work. Attempting this challenge is precisely the work of María José Arjona. Its objective, as simple as it is profound, is the following: to reassess the experience of the body over time.
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The Collective Body: Maria José Arjona Interviewed by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
Performance as a poetry of long duration.
Maria José Arjona is a Colombian multidisciplinary performance artist whose work proposes through radical poetic gestures a unique form of political resistance. At a time when political art is understood primarily as political activism, Arjona instead treats the body as a site for subtle and complex rearticulations and questionings of normative conditioning and violence. She moves away from a focus on the identity of the artist to highlight the organic, expansive shared potential of the body, a body that in its centrality may not be individual or biographical, but collective and unconditioned. Her retrospective exhibition, To Be Known As Infinite, at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá in Colombia, co-curated by Claudia Segura Campins and Jennifer Burris in close dialogue with Arjona, proposes a porous and nonlinear experience that imagines the museum itself as the body. To Be Known As Infinite is an experiment on how to activate the expanded field and open-ended potential of performance. Multiple mediums—video, sculpture, props, drawings, and writing—interact with one another to create a deconstructed yet expanded scenography that is either activated by performers or by the spectators. Reenactment is a large component of the exhibition. Chiefly, instead of encountering videos of past works, the viewer will experience their reactivations. Arjona is interested not so much in strict reenactments, but in personal rearticulations; as a result, the work is reimagined. To Be Known As Infinite proposes the transformative experience of the body—the artist’s, our own, and others.
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What the body can do, the 10th book of this Colombian Artists Collection, presents a monographic investigation on the artist María José Arjona, whose actions explore the possibilities of the body and continually reinvent them through open and uncertain experimentation processes that seek trigger intense affective experiences. This research was carried out by Rubén Darío Yepes Muñoz, academic, cultural researcher and art critic from Antioquia, who, in 2014, was the winner of the National Incentives program, Grant for Monographic Research on Colombian Artists granted by the Ministry of Culture.
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Edited by Annette Stahmer, Parole 2: Phonetic Skin explores the relationship of skin to language. Contributors include Mladen Dolar (Professor of Philosophy, Ljubljana), Naomi Segal (Professor of German and Romance Studies, London), Imogen Stidworthy (artist, Liverpool), Allen S. Weiss (Professor of Performance and Cinema Studies, New York), Janet Beizer (Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Boston), André Lepecki (curator and author, New York), Anish Kapoor (artist, London), Steven Feld (Professor of Ethnomusicology, Santa Fé), Paul Dickinson (artist, Chicago), David Locke (Professor of Ethnomusicology, Medford), Maria José Arjona (artist, Miami), Leif Elggren (artist, Stockholm), Brandon LaBelle (artist, Berlin), Hubertus von Amelunxen (author and curator, Berlin), Petra Maria Meyer (Professor of Cultural Studies, Kiel), Leonardo Guelman (author and publisher, Rio de Janeiro) and De Geuzen (artist group, Amsterdam), Trikoton (artist group, Berlin).
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From an interview between María José Arjona, the Colombian 'performer', and Meg Stuart, perhaps the most important choreographer in the world, these meditations on the arts of the body emerge.
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The dialogue focuses on the investigation Little History of Animality that the Colombian theorist has been developing and has partially published in Quebec under the title of Animalités. In this research, Arcos-Palma makes visible the work of various artists and their close relationship with the animal. In this dialogue with Arjona this aspect is highlighted, providing fundamental elements for the understanding of his work.
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In her performances a refinement, a delicacy and a strength that I associate with drawing are manifested; with a line that extends on a paper outlining a route, or articulating a shape. In her case, the drawing takes place in the space-time of the world we inhabit, in "real space and time", and its substance is time.
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