A man forcing his biceps to show off his strength, 2017, petrified earth

Tania Pérez Córdova

“I like to treat sculptures as if they were events”: Tania Pérez Córdova‘s poetics is oriented towards transferring a sense of a chronology to the artistic object, embodying an action performed in time.

The sculptural compositions of Tania Pérez Córdova are performative works that do not move – contemporary relics, as she calls them. Driven by a fascination with materiality, the artist explores the transition between the production of an object and the experience of it as an event in everyday life.

Installation view, Characters, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, 2022, Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, Photo: kunstdokumentation.com

Notions of absence are as important to her as materiality. She often tests the physical limits of materials by transforming them into something else. Pérez Córdova’s objects remain in a state of suspense and shed light on the origin of materials such as metal, marble, glass, and earth.

“I scouted for a muscly man at a local gym and invited him to make an imprint of his biceps which I then, by a series of molds and casts, made in petrified earth. To my surprise, when the earth dried out the muscle shrank.”

- Tania Pérez Córdova

“These objects, while seemingly uneventful, create situations where the artist’s negotiations with those third parties are made visible to the viewer. Her delicate work might wrongfully be read as conceptual, but when analyzed carefully, her sculptures gain a completely different dimension: they are also the women left without one gold earring; those people whose viewing prescriptions lie in the gallery; they are also the credit card user, the bank and the whole credit system; they are also all of us, and our relationship to digital communication.”

- José Esparza Chong Cuy

Tania Pérez Córdova, * in Mexico City (MX) in 1979, lives and works in Mexico City (MX).

We focus on a woman facing sideways, 2013/2017 (detail), Credit: Tania Pérez Córdova