Isabelle Albuquerque

Orgy For Ten People In One Body

Isabelle Albuquerque is a sculptor who explores emergent systems of intrapersonal communion, collective identity, transhumanism, plurality, love, loss, memory and the emanation of desire.

This November, Albuquerque will present Orgy For Ten People In One Body at Jeffrey Deitch in New York. The exhibition brings together for the first time her complete series of ten headless figurative sculptures created between 2019 and 2022. In this work, the artist uses her own body and transmutes it across multiple forms and material languages. With a background in performance, Albuquerque is interested in materials like cast bronze and melting wax that encode a precise moment in time, making something once fleeting more eternal.

Orgy For Ten People In One Body is realized with classical and boundary-pushing techniques that incorporate both human and robotic hands. Acephalic in a way that Georges Bataille would have appreciated, the sculptures give body to a post-capitalist mythological world to come, in which a patriarchal language of form has been derailed and subverted by female eros.

Charged with personal experience, collective history and futuristic projection, Orgy For Ten People In One Body performs and subverts art historical narratives and archetypes. Classic interspecies love stories like Leda and the Swan and Romulus and Remus meet new embodiments of hybrid creatures, mythic mothers, witches, pussies and saints. The work invites a poetic acceptance of multi-beingness, non-linear time, metamorphosis and a merge between self and other. Here, the body becomes a force of solidarity and pleasure—an activated collective site of resistance, power and ecstasy.

Isabelle Albuquerque lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the daughter of Lita Albuquerque, the granddaughter of Ferida “Fred” Albuquerque and the great-granddaughter of Smarda the Jewel—a matriarchal lineage of artists from North Africa. She is a founding member of the Los Angeles performance group Hecuba, which she started with her long-time partner Jon Ray. Albuquerque and Ray are also founders of Osk, a studio that develops artificial intelligence to create and look at art and individual experience through hybrid human and nonhuman perspectives. Orgy For Ten People In One Body will be Albuquerque’s first solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. She is currently working on a monograph about the series through an in-depth visual essay and conversations with the artists Miranda July and Arthur Jafa, to be co-published by Jeffrey Deitch, Nicodim and Pacific in January 2023.