arteba - 2024

arteba 2024

Costa Salguero, Buenos Aires, October 30, 2020 to September 1, 2024. Artists: Karina Sztein, Cecilia Villafuerte. Curator: Luis María Rojas. The renewed appreciation of textile practice in contemporary art has given relevance to new discourses that challenge, on the one hand, the official canon of the visual arts and, on the other, the way we think about the world of sociocultural relations that intersect in representations of the feminine. In their own way, Cecilia Villafuerte and Karina Sztein find themselves at the crossroads of these issues. Cecilia presents a discourse outside the field of art, considering her production as a political tool, while Karina focuses her practice inward, reinterpreting the traditions of geometric abstraction through textiles. Both proposals operate on aesthetic, political, and narrative levels, reinterpreting textiles as an affirmation of resistance in Cecilia's case, or as a metaphor for reparation in Karina's. The shift of textiles—from a traditional technique confined to the world of crafts—to gaining a legitimate place in the visual arts has taken, and continues to take, several paths that converge on a narrative-aesthetic plane, complicating our understanding of art. Sometimes it appears as a realm of archaic gestures rescued and updated in the rhythm of the needle, sometimes as a technology of care that, even in its intimacy, connects us to others, generating new relational fabrics. However, textile appropriations in the art world have their own particularities: Cecilia and Karina place emphasis on different aspects to speak of different universes, which nevertheless intersect in this proposal to diversify our perceptions of the feminine, the limits of art, memory, the dialogue with tradition, and the formal work of geometry or color. One proposal challenges the other, opening a more complex space of enunciation where the ethical is articulated with the aesthetic, the formal with the narrative, and the political with the artistic. Luis María Rojas