ART CITIES: Basel-Berenice Olmedo

The Mexican artist Berenice Olmedo often focuses on the most rejected and vulnerable in society—whether stray dogs or physically impaired humans. Extending this concern, in one of her first European solo exhibitions, the Mexican artist conceives a new project that generates form from investigations into various technological enhancements of the body.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Kunsthalle Basel Archive

A multitude of motorized sculptures, suspended from wires, welcomes you into the first space of Berenice Olmedo’s exhibition “Hic et Nunc”. Translucent and strange, corporeal and technological, near colorless  and seemingly weightless, they quiver, curl, and torque. Occasionally they pause, as if temporarily exhausted. Newly made for her largest exhibition to date and  her first institutional show in Switzerland, Olmedo’s sculptures might initially evoke earth-worms exploring plastic cocoons, lugubriously twitchy condom-encased penises, or even extra-terrestrial massage devices. Their origin does  not readily reveal itself. In fact, the artist used a rehabilitation clinic’s archive of cast stumps from different person who has had a limb amputated, taking molds from these forms to create her own, second-generation, replicas. Each sculpture, made by the artist using the same materials commonly deployed in the production of prosthetics, is a conjunction of  two different subjects’ body casts. At first glance, they offer an appearance of reproduced seriality, yet all are unique and show the variations of each individual amputation. The amputees’ names, featured as part of the works’ titles, hint at this assembly of singularities. The objects’ movements arise from small robotic mechanisms in each sculpture’s bottommost  tip, draped in a silicone liner typically used to create a protective barrier between an amputated limb and its prosthesis. Some of the sheaths  appear dirty, or used, or have tears in their soft tissue. Such details insist on these “bodies” as marked and imperfect, but functional and dis-tinct, and add to their oddly mesmerizing allure. To choose “Hic et Nunc” (Latin for “here and now”) as the title for these works and the exhibition  as a whole insists that for all the timelessness of Olmedo’s inquiry (the body is, after all, sculture’s most enduring subject), there is an urgent need to rethink the definition of what is human in the present moment. The question of what counts as “normal” (or its opposite, and who decides) has been the motor of the Mexican artist’s practice for many years now. And those marginalized by society—whether  stray dogs or physically impaired humans—have been her polestars. Olmedo’s previous mechanized sculptures were perpetually failing to achieve the erectness and verticality that represents health, ability, and control. Her sculptures in this exhibition’s first room, on the other hand, enact a choreography far more ambiguous and even more unsettling. They lend body, quite literally, to the artist’s prolific theoretical writing, in which she argues for a reconsideation of what defines the human in order to finally and fully include those who do not match the white, Western, masculine, able-bodied norm.

In the second and third rooms, the play with imperceptibility continues. Hollow vessels bulge  in ways that varyingly insinuate a body’s truncated form. There are casts of amputated legs again, but also of hips and torsos, thermoformed and artfully combined into fusions of fragmented parts—frozen siblings of their mechanized counterparts in the first room. Exquisite corpses  of a sort, they are immobilized and braced with a hint of violence. Puckers, valves, and gaping openings punctuate these carapaces, which are attached to the metal railings of hospital beds  or, in one case, a hip brace (abduction orthosis). The smooth chrome rods and brackets evoke bodily injury and a certain cold, clinical asceticism. Titled “alêtheia”, ancient Greek for “truth”  or “disclosure,” these chillingly beautiful works suggest postapocalyptic ice-sculpture versions  of classic Greek figures, now broken—at once timeless and weirdly contemporary. With these two groups of works, the artist dis- possesses the human of its claim of wholeness and foregrounds the political dimensions of dis- ability, illness, and care. The merciless standardization imposed on our bodies is arguably the through-line that connects Olmedo’s works over the last few years, and it is the visible, snaking wire that electrifies her thoughts and practice. Again and again, she asks us to recognize humanness as produced and the human as inherently disabled—unable to exist without the support of extrinsic aids of whatever kind. Her recuperation of forms and materials from the arsenal of medicine aims to transform the pros-thesis from a mechanical solution for a supposed bodily defect into an existential technology  that unveils the nature of what it is to be human. Olmedo articulates what some call a crip sensibility, disavowing physical purity through an un-relenting inquiry into health and care, “normal” and other. Her art is rife with cues to understanding the self under capitalism, with its in- exorable demand for labor productivity geared toward profit maximization—the extension of colonial rule and an imperialist logic. And under these inhumane and relentless conditions,  we are further judged, disciplined, and punished according to laws made by and for those con-forming to so-called universal norms. Yet in  a place like Mexico, where the artist hails from and continues to live, or other places where  the welfare state has crumbled or indeed never properly existed, vast swaths of the population are without adequate access to the kind of  medical attention, healthy diet, and care needed to maintain such standards. Bodies always  end up paying the price, and some—because  of their skin color or class or gender—more  than others.

Photo: Exhibition view, Berenice Olmedo, Hic et Nunc, Kunsthalle Basel, 2022. Photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel

Info: Curator: Elena Filipovic, Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 10/6-18/9/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch/