Ana Mirabal (Maracay, 1992) experienced her first need to create her own space at the age of 16 when she moved to the city of Caracas to study architecture. However, it will be when she is forced to emigrate from Venezuela in 2016 that the need to meet or, perhaps better, discover herself becomes immanent. A foreigner recently arrived in Buenos Aires, Mirabal travels through all the cycles of uprooting, from which – in a recent duel – she found the necessary (and often sharp) gadgets to undertake her most important work: reinventing her subjectivity and, sometimes, recovering, as snippets of a broken photograph, what she once was. Thanks to her musical career and her proximity to drawing, but also to a great extent to her training as an architect, artistic creation always went hand in hand with her process of ‘existing- creating-for-then-being’, where she found diverse means of expression to carry out her most intimate project; among them, photography, sculpture, and audiovisuals.
In her work we find the explorative need, at times playful, to settle in one’s own body through the lines that are formed in the spatial positioning. The desire to enhance the face, with just a few details that lead the viewer’s gaze to those features that communicate something like a secret message, is seen throughout all her shows. Without distractions and without clear gender distinctions, Mirabal gives us a poetics of a face that presents itself in its purest identity and deepest feelings. At other times there are faces split into other bodies that seem to seek a geometric communion, as if poking at the inside in its encounter with the outside that lends itself to reflection. The question of gender also appears in her photographs, which seem to offer us a Mirabal that frees itself and those who observe it, in front of the eye of a camera that she herself set up to make us participants in her artistic practice. The skin appears as another canvas to go through and conquer from its own, without the impositions of stagnant imaginaries. By Eugenia Arria
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