Mariana Najmanovich Sirota

Lives and works in Santiago, Chile

Artist statement

I have been dedicated to artistic creation since 2006. My work stems from a sustained concern: violence, death, and the ways these phenomena manifest in contemporary life. I explore how they become trivialized or technified in the present. Today I follow that same question into transhumanism: how this future-oriented ideology transforms—or attempts to transform—human beings in the face of one of the oldest and most constitutive questions of our species: death. That same intersection between the ancestral and the yet-to-come is what I pursue on a formal level: painting (oil on canvas or paper), one of the oldest artistic languages in history, enters into dialogue with objects made from industrial materials (latex, stainless steel, iridescent fabrics) that evoke the technological and the contemporary. Today that intersection is concentrated in a project on cryogenics: the still-hypothetical practice of preserving bodies at extremely low temperatures while awaiting future reanimation. Faced with a body that is neither alive nor dead, but suspended, I ask myself what it means to claim to overcome death, and what rituals such a body is missing. Selected series and previous exhibitions In La Colonia (Galería Metales Pesados Visual, Santiago, 2015) I worked on Colonia Dignidad, a specific episode of violence in Chile's recent history. In Prototipo para Armar and Funny Games (shown in the solo exhibition Pálido Fuego, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, 2017), I was...

Artwork