Displacements

2012 - Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán

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Ana Roldán’s Displacements works use images taken from a 1970s exhibition catalogue for an exhibition called The Death in Mexico. Using pre-Columbian objects and other artifacts from Mexican history, the exhibition aimed to explore various representations of death in the Mexican cultural tradition. Roldán’s works begin with these rich black-and-white photographs and break them apart into fragments, slicing and dismembering the artifacts they depict. Puzzling the pieces back together in altered ways, Roldán’s resulting images reveal lines of fissure, gaps of black, and dislocations in form. These imperfections in the surface of her reconstituted artifacts relate to the imperfect processes of memory and the fragmented inheritance of knowledge and meaning. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage. Using a wide range of materials, her work is inspired by cultural phenomena: historical events, philosophical ideas, language, systems, reflections on aesthetics; theoretical concepts in general. She studied history at ENAH, Mexico, and fine arts at HKB Bern from 1999-2003. Important exhibitions include soloshows at Badischer Kunstverein and at Kunsthaus Langenthal in 2011 as well as groupshows at Witte de With in Rotterdam 2012 and the participation at Lulennial in Mexico in 2015.

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Colors:

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• death.n.01
• mortality.n.01
• dislocation.n.01
• memory.n.01
• heritage.n.01
• identity.n.01