MARÍA JOSÉ ARJONA

REPRESENTED ARTIST

María José Arjona (b.1973 in Santa Fe de Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in Miami. She was trained as a contemporary dancer before turning to performance art. She received her Master's degree in visual arts from the Superior Academy of Art in Bogotá. She also has been the artist-in-residence at the Watermill Center for Robert Wilson in New York.

Her recent performance exhibitions were included at the South Florida Art Center in Miami, the Miami Light Project, the Ballroom Marfa in Texas, and the Damien-B Contemporary Art Center in Miami. She also exhibited video performances at the Galleri Se in Bergen, Norway, and at the Museo de Barrio in New York.

ARTWORKS

The Kiss Series

The Kiss was a self-taken photograph and was part of her solo exhibition in New York at the Art Space Location One, in 2012. The Kiss maps a system uniting two bodies. It is a gesture magnified by the use of sound emerging from the action of kissing and intensified by the working presence of the performer’s body. “The Kiss” (is a long durational performance), a breathing system where the performer’s body becomes the intersection enabling the entire organism to work, reveals the intricate rhythm between lungs, fluids, and muscles while kissing.

All the others in me Series

The body, in opposition to this language system and ironically living it, speaks through organs, plays with images, sounds, smells, textures, mixtures, everything reacts, absorbs and transpires ... For the 4th Marrakech Biennale, Arjona creates a very particular piece in her body of work as it is the first to directly allude to gender policies. Simulating a striptease in which she takes off clothes but does not undress, the artist examines the connotation of "femininity" and the wishes and desires of the public.

The Frequencies That Make Me Series

"The frequencies that make me" is a project that aims to find points of contact between dance and performance to generate a space in between, where the body plays with time, explores the sound as a surface of possible becoming, and mixes with matter to germinate bodies in full transition. It is not about building a new body, but rather generating fleeting and less definable bodies to reclaim a world of horizontal relationships between humans and non-humans.