Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, 2024.
Deeply committed to making multiple temporalities visible within our shared space of the present, Cortez’s works often follow material traces of premodern Mesoamerican cultures and their relationship to geological processes and cosmologies that continue through Indigenous practices today. She constructs imaginative sculptures of welded and hand-beaten steel that articulate a diasporic experience of simultaneity and multiplicity. Like a double exposure that captures multiple sites and moments within a single frame, her artworks are time machines or speculative portals to other dimensions. Questions of migration, and its dynamics of recursion and connection are present in all her works. In particular, Cortez thinks these across multiple registers, from the social to the geological, as even a landscape is in perpetual tectonic motion across territories and borders.
Stela XX (Absence), a monolithic steel sculpture, follows the migration of particles from the Ilopango tierra blanca joven super-eruption in the mid-first millennium CE. As rock and magma blasted into the stratosphere, it darkened the sun and was carried by atmospheric currents to fall across the globe, resulting in an extended winter that affected the ancient Maya civilization and continents beyond. The traces of the volcano are present both near and far: the caldera, or deep depression in the earth, left in the volcano’s wake subsequently filled with water to become Lake Ilopango while particles of its ash can still be found deep in Arctic ice. Stela XX’s contoured lines are inspired by photographs and drawings of premodern Maya monoliths now housed in museum collections, which were deliberately broken to extract them from their sacred sites. Its undulating steel surface is welded with glyphs that chart this loss and mark their absences.
Text by Vic Brooks.
Images courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.
BEATRIZ CORTEZ 