OPENING: Saturday, 30.01.2016, 2 pm - 5 pm.

 

SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art presents from January 30 to April 16, 2016 Sans peau / No Skin, an exhibition by Ines Doujak, Pablo Lafuente and Alessandro Marques.

 

In Brazilian Portuguese, the name for jellyfish is ‘água-viva,’ living water. The name uses a substance, ‘água’, in order to capture a behaviour: the água-viva is unequivocally a living creature, but the living substance is water, and water is also the substance where the living substance lives. Or, the same substance is shared by the living water and the neither-living-nor-still water, to the point that it might be difficult to differentiate one from the other: there is no fur, tissue, container, barrier, just a different density. No inside protected from the outside, no essence hidden underneath the surface.

 

Adopting this as a starting point, the exhibition Sans peau / No Skin explores how bodies may live and move within a space where skin has disappeared, and where other boundaries have also, at least partially, collapsed. Through the use of chita, a popular fabric from the northeast of Brazil, characterised by its pattern of flora in vivid colours and omnipresent in the clothes and homes of the region, Sans peau / No Skin presents an environment where a language ‘of the people’ is displaced into a new context and function. These fluid displacements resonate with the changing locations of bodies, as people and groups flee to and from places and conditions that have become intolerable.

 

Sans peau / No Skin is an experimental collaboration between Ines Doujak, Pablo Lafuente and Alessandro Marques. It brings together Doujak’s investigations into the possibilities and political history of fabrics, Marques’ work with design and manufacture of clothing and Lafuente’s investigation of popular forms of culture in Brazil.

 

 

This project is part of the long term Focus Program on Água Viva.

 

Thanks to the Consulate General of Brazil in Montreal.