Ruby Rumié “Weaving Streets”

Nohra Haime Gallery

This event has ended.

This important work was born from a chance encounter between Ruby Rumié and Dominga Torres Tehran. Dominga, a woman who for more than 45 years has walked the city streets selling fish, caught the attention of the artist for her unique and natural beauty. Unnoticed until that moment, she completely captivated Rumié.

Weaving Streets is an attempt to rescue, from oblivion and invisibility, women like Dominga who have spent valuable years of their lives as ambulant street vendors, permanently wandering the neighborhoods of the city.

“Weaving Street” was a phrase used by grandmothers to describe those who walked the streets of the city often, and therefore, became the title of this project.

A series of photographs, a video, a poster, and five volumes on Cartagena’s ambulant street vendors comprise this arresting exhibition opening at NH Galería, where the artist’s goal is to present new views on the vendors and their environment. The viewer’s encounter with these women will be different for the exhibition - it will be special, as will be the women’s encounter with their own images.

Rumié condenses the collected material into a Corpus, a historical archival manner, comprised of five volumes that unfold spatially in the gallery. Photo albums picturing each participant, stamp albums paying tribute to them, and a video of a ceremony held in their honor will frame the gallery space so that the images collectively transform into a fight against death and oblivion, thus becoming a legacy and memory to be heard by generations to come.

To see something for the first time, when it has always been there, is like running a thin veil between the visible and the invisible, a veil of old and constant stereotypes that keep us numb, or blind, so we ignore the marvelous and different realities.

“Problems such as gender violence, gentrification, social barriers and discrimination constitute a constant concern which I attempt to uncover through my work, by means of large installations where I use repetition as a platform for protest; bodies as objects of mass consumption that reveal the disappearance of our intangible heritage, and photographs to suggest the enigma of social stratification, all of these intend to stimulate reflection, playfulness, visual pleasure, emotion and inquiry” explains Rumié.

Born in Cartagena de Indias, Ruby Rumié studied painting, drawing and sculpture at the School of Fine Arts (1980-1982). From 1989 to 1996 she worked the technique of hyperrealism painting. She later breaks with the academy and incorporates social and territorial heritage into her work, questioning the commitment of the artist with society. Rumié has held important exhibitions in Colombia, Chile, United States and France. She participated in the First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, and was recently granted a scholarship by The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, where she completed the last stage of the “Weaving Streets” project, during a residency of four weeks.