Habitar lo blando – Sistemas y rituales periféricos (Inhabiting the soft – Peripheral Systems and Rituals)

Until 10.03.24
Artist Marina Gryciuk
Curated by María Laura Carrascal

Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan B. CastagninoAvenida Pellegrini 2202
2000 Rosario, Argentina

Weaving, weaving, sewing, overlapping textiles, crossing threads and ideas characterize the work of Marina Gryciuk, a maker who produces in the shifting terrain of arts that challenge the hierarchies of the modern canon. Since the 1990s, she has made central those peripheral rituals that the autonomous arts had isolated as “women’s work” and has positioned herself in the art system through the softness of matter, but also through an elusive action that does not admit of conceptual imprisonment. In this sense, her professional development is interesting, in which she articulates individual practices and collective projects that have impacted her production, participants, and the spaces they inhabit. Some of these experiences are the Qomi brand, the result of the exchange of ancestral knowledge and techniques with women from the Qom community at the El Obrador Cultural Center, and El Enredo, a workshop developed with people in prison that she has recently coordinated with other artists and designers through the NGO “Mujeres tras las rejas” (Women Behind Bars).

Marina Gryciuk is an artist who dialogues with the textile traditions of the past and present, oscillating between the field of plastic art and that of folk expressions to continue thinking about her own history from the weave that condenses knowledge and encounters. Her work is based on her passion for textiles, sewing and connection with the body in a relationship with historical traditions that she actualizes from contemporary work using multiple strategies. Textile objects that function autonomously and can become clothing accessories, fabric spheres embroidered with beads and rhinestones that move without prejudice between the fields of art and decoration are resources that the artist combines with audiovisual recordings and photographs for which she shares authorship with Gustavo Goñi in a long-standing creative partnership based on similar interests.

Attention to the symbolic dimensions of the body in relation to the environment is constant in her production, from the baroque colors and textures of her pieces/accessories, through the vast materiality of the collages and dolls made in groups, to the synthesis of her latest baskets that function as perforated chrysalises. In short, it is the creation of a singular textile language that makes possible the transformations of a work bound by a constant concern, that of keeping alive the encounter between art and life.

María Laura Carrascal