A Golden Age: Pulse, Throb, Drift         

Rosana Antolí
A Golden Age: Pulse, Throb, Drift
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21.02 - 17.05.2020
Floor 4

The collective is always trembling because it has left outside all that it needed to take into account to define itself as a common world
Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature

Of the sea. Open Sea. Transparent. Translucent. Bell and tentacles. Nothing hidden. A gelatinous body of nerves. Pulsating. Throbbing. Drifting
Terry Tempest Williams, Jellies: Living Art

Jellies somehow live as the very element that surrounds them
Stacy Alaimo, Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics

 

Rosana Antolí works with rhythm and flow, with the tides of social choreography, eternal loops and feedback of the body in society. In this exhibition, A Golden Age: Pulse, Throb, Drift, curated by Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Rosana Antolí takes a dive into the aqueous as a state-of-mind. Through deep artistic investigation, Antolí expands aesthetic and movement-based understandings that question what is human.

Antolí’s extensive practice considers repetition, politics and everyday choreographies. Responding to the question ‘What might we come to understand by imagining the world from a fluid point of view?’ posed by author Terry Tempest Williams, the artist presents a body of work unrestrained by form. Interweaving sculptural elements with live performance, drawing and video, the exhibition halls of Centro Centro become a proposal for an expanding and liquescent Golden Age.

Into A Golden Age, the artist invites the figure of the immortal jellyfish. Found in the Mediterranean Sea, the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, is the only creature known to live forever. The sea creature floats between states of maturity - rising off the sea bed to reproduce and then sinking back down in a state of adolescence. The ultimate loop. Theorist Donna Haraway speaks of the jellyfish as one of the ‘tentacular figures’ who are able to entwine modes of feeling and knowing in non-human ways. Antolí responds to the conceptual proposition of the mysterious jelly creature by amplifying ways of being connected to transparency, loops, rhythm, cadence, rhyme, and buoyancy in her work.

A Golden Age draws upon the current and urgent conversations of the state of planetary ecologies. Her work considers the limits and demarcations of bodies in these times. In Antolí’s A Golden Age jellyfish thrive, humans co-exist and the proposition of choreographic entanglement of Pulse, Throb and Drift are echoed and multiplied.

Rosana Antolí is a Spanish-born, London-based artist. She graduated with an MA in Performance (Department of Sculpture) from the Royal College of Art, London in 2015. Her practice examines the role of social choreography and movement in relation with art. She has exhibited at Tate Modern (UK, 2019), The RYDER (UK, 2019), Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery Boston University (USA, 2018), Pompidou Museum (Spain, 2018), Artium Vitoria Museum (Spain, 2019), DA2 Museum (Spain, 2018), Zabludowicz Collection (UK, 2017), BBVA Foundation (Spain, 2017), Joan Miro Foundation Museum (Spain, 2016) and CA2M Museum (Spain, 2012). Member of Royal British Society of Sculptors in London, UK (2015- 2018) and International Advisory Board for the Institute of Social Choreography. Recognition of her work includes LOOP Video Prize (2017), Generaciones National Art Prize (2017), 2015 MULTIVERSE Grant for Video Art Creation, Royal British Society of Sculptors Award (2015) and Gasworks’ International Fellowships (2015).

Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is Swedish/Australian curator, writer and lecturer based in Stockholm. Bailey-Charteris curates this show on behalf of Index Foundation (Stockholm).

See the exhibition on Flickr