Watch Now: Teresita Fernández
b. 1968, Miami, USA; lives and works in New York City, USA
b. 1968, Miami, USA; lives and works in New York City, USA
Presenting with Lehmann Maupin at Frieze London 2022 as part of Indra's Net, curated by Sandhini Poddar
“Caribbean history really shapes our ideas around imperialism, slavery, and the decimation of Indigenous populations; all these things really start here in a very poignant way, and yet there is an erasure as to what these tiny islands mean”, states artist Teresita Fernández.
Working across painting, sculpture and monumental public art, Fernández’s self-reflexive practice excavates the historical, political and imaginative potentialities of site and landscape. Archipelago(Cervix), 2020, a striking wall relief made of visceral charcoal, resembles an opening or a portal. Here, all the Caribbean islands appear in one contiguous form that suggests a cervix. Since the 1950s, Puerto Rico has been an island laboratory for the U.S. eugenics programme, wherein women have been used for contraceptive testing and often sterilized as a result. Archipelago(Cervix) links human exploitation of the land (charred wood) and the body (women’s oppression) as witnessed in the Caribbean. Fernández poignantly asks, “How do we decolonise our minds?”
About Indra's Net
Derived from ancient Buddhist and Hindu thought forms, Indra’s Net refers to an ethics of being, where an individual atom holds within it the structure of reality. Imagine a vast bejewelled net: at every nexus there is
a reflective orb that mirrors and refracts every other orb in its entirety. Each part is held within the whole in a system of dependent origination. All sentient life is interconnected; shifts to one atom subtly alter the rest.
Curated by Sandhini Poddar, this group presentation brings together leading international artists whose practices are informed by this prescient metaphor. In various media, we learn of ancestry, history, language, consciousness and futurity as being bound to the earth, which serves as a perennial witness through the arc of time.
In the video above, Fernández shares her response to the question, 'What does interconnectedness mean to you?'
Teresita Fernández, Archipelago(Cervix), 2020, charcoal, 213.5 x 290cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London
