Tania Pérez Córdova

• 20.04.–27.05.2023

Galerie Martin Janda is pleased to present the third solo exhibition of Tania Pérez Córdova from 21st April until 27th May 2023.

When speaking about the title of this exhibition, Tania mentioned the constant noise of the news, its seemingly inexorable trickle that recalls a leak in the neighbor’s flat that doesn’t want to stop. She had in mind the immanent melting and wearing out of things, their drying up, breaking into new configurations. A composition through disintegration. Something strangely rhythmical, like a sound of a drip in a room, in a house, in a town, in a country.

In such a panorama we all seem to be writing from a place of instability, of stupefied anxiety, of mild yet undirected rage. We write from inside the palace of inherent hurry, from the position of striving for pure maintenance, from that tinnitus that doesn’t want to go away. And that’s why the pivotal force unleashed by Tania throughout the exhibition might actually be the production of something through its own slow disintegration, its consumption or reiteration.

At the centre of this constellation there is a sound and an object. First a sound and then an object that enables such sound. There is rhythm. A ceaseless ticking. A metronome for the whole space.

A cast of a face barely readable is filled with water and frozen on a daily base; on a daily base melting until complete consumption. Drop by drop, the sculpture disintegrates into a second cast, a double of the same lineaments, producing the soundtrack of the exhibition.

Left and right, copies of plants plagued by what appear to be widely spread diseases mimic yet another reshaping: the eating out of a form unleashing another form. Unstable and precarious, yet a form, nevertheless. Like frozen droplets, a series of golden chains perforates the bulleted leaves completing the still image of a slow, almost imperceptible process of change aiming straight towards utter formal reduction.

In the second room, an object created through the process of casting an original, cutting it up, melting it and recasting a new copy into that first mould. An instrument, the bell, thought for beating time and drawing attention, now becoming something new, unusable, silent, a step closer to its own dissipation.

Finally, what appears to be a net, or a vail, a light barrier of sort incrusted with indistinguishable residues, bits and pieces of documents shredded and then made into a thin layer of waste just about supported by a thin layer of fabric. Destructed documents acquired from a company whose only aim is to destroy other companies’ private information, contracts, employees’ IDs, etcetera. Like air filters processing pollution, the large installation flattens and reshuffles the bureaucratic footprints of unknown lives into a new appearance.

And here again the sound. That first dripping, traveling through the space just to be amplified in this last room. A reiteration. Maybe a closure.

In all this Tania seems to suggest that there might be only a feeling, or a hint at the feeling that a thing could become something new only through a process of using up all it used to be. A suspended point between construction and destruction. And that’s neither good nor bad. It’s just the place where we ended up writing from.

Text: Francesco Pedraglio