Descripción de la Exposición
Xippas is happy to present in its Paris space a dialogue between two artists: Anna Bella Geiger (born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1933) and Karishma D’Souza (born in Mumbai, India in 1983).
Although both artists belong to different generations, not to say different geographies, their poetic systems overlap in many ways. They do, for example, share a common obsession with territories and maps, whether those are contemporary cartographies or ancient mappa mundi, and take a map both as a noun and thus an objectified representation of a land or a globe, and as a verb, in a sense of a conceptual act of “mapping out new meanings”.
Their practices are entangled with the idea of storytelling which doesn’t only seek to destabilize an established narrative (which both artists do), but also to gather, archive and protect different viewpoints in the carrier bag of history - and of fiction. This idea of a fiction seen as a recipient of the non-heroic and non-linear stories and originating from Ursula Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” from 1986, seems to resonate deeply within the universes of the two artists. Just like Le Guin, both Anna Bella Geiger and Karishma D’Souza outline, in their own unique manner, an alternative to “a linear, progressive Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of being” which speaks with ‘weapons’ and ‘wars’ far more often than with ‘words’. Likewise, they invite multiplicities of voices and visions into their systems of thoughts – to call into question things, structures, and ways of being. And, perhaps, it is through this multi-voiced kind of questioning, that our world, shaped by a logic based on domination and globalization, may evolve and transform. Bursting into new life rather than bursting at the seams (or into flames)…
Exposición. 31 oct de 2024 - 09 feb de 2025 / Artium - Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo / Vitoria-Gasteiz, Álava, España