ROXANA BARBA

DOS CUERPOS <BETWEEN CYBORG AND SPIRIT>

Curated by Daniel Arturo Almeida

Roxana Barba’s solo exhibition presents two bodies of work, tracing her research encoding Andean cosmology and cyborgian desire through body-responsive installations, video-performance, and photo collage. For Barba, this desire is “a yearning to become a hybrid being capable of mending imbalances between species to build networks of equilibrium.”

In the exhibition, bodies covered in mud, germinating rituals, and illustrations of the ancestral Pallar Moche legume are composed into grids referencing Paracas’ burial textiles depicting interspecies iconography. A modular spider platform nests Barba’s body, serpentining to the rhythm of a weaving loom. Gleaming chakanas project the plundering of sacred Huacas to resurface a world of ancestral wisdom, delinked from its place of origin.

Informed by eight years of experience choreographing and directing multimedia stage performances, ‘Dos Cuerpos’ draws from Barba’s latest pieces: ‘Apuntes Americanos-Kanay’ (2022-2023), awarded a 2019 Knight Arts Challenge, and ‘In my center a Cyborg Seed’ (to be premiered in 2024), awarded a 2022 Knight New Work and a NALAC Fund for the Arts grant.