Paola Siri Renard

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Artist statement

Paola Siri Renard’s practice investigates Western architecture, natural processes and collective imaginary. Through appropriation of prevailing architectural archives and defense narratives ; her transitional-state sculptures explore metamorphosis, bodies disintegrating and morphing into fictional constellations. She designs her installations as devices of displacement between centuries, between worlds and their myths. Renard’s hand-sculpted works question the treatment of legacy, its dissemination and the exclusionary underpinnings of specific identities - echoing the history of her Martinican and Swedish heritage. _ Margaux Knight (independant curator) To encounter Paola Siri Renard’s sculptures is to experience an unsettling ambivalence. Their formal refinement seduces, yet a sense of discomfort sets in when faced with these artificial bodies, held upright by sharp metal apparatuses. They evoke spaces of productivity such as slaughterhouses, where humans, animals, and machines coexist in a brutal choreography. At the intersection of the cyborg, the anatomical fragment, and ornament, her works question alterity and physically activate our gaze: What is a body? Where does it begin, where does it end? At what point does it become other? Beneath their industrial appearance, her sculptures are rooted in an artisanal gesture. Hand-fashioned from industrial, cinematic, or fashion waste (acrylic plaster, polystyrene, metals, fibers, glass), they transform these materials into...

Artwork