Adriana Marmorek “Eros”

Nohra Haime Gallery

[Image: Adriana Marmorek "Lipstick II" (2015) wood, glass, tablet, electric cord and his definition video 2"11' loop, Edition of 6 13.8 x 9.5 x 2.4 in.]

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The Nohra Haime Gallery presents a series of 30 works by Adriana Marmorek which are part of her lifelong investigation of love and desire.

“Ineffability is the experience of death. The person who finds love is almost always unable to name this love and it seems that any language is inadequate to refer to the beloved. Yet, it is from the moment in which love is lost that the language around it finally articulates. Where Will You Be, Love? is a piece that works on this premise and materializes it in an allusion to the inadequacy of verbal language to refer to love. Here lies the key to Marmorek’s later work: the language used to speak of love is not verbal but magical.

That’s why Marmorek begins to engage in a much closer creative dialogue with those who want to share with her their individual experiences with love. Thus, this collaborative exercise continues to expand as the artist’s creative process becomes freer and gets stripped of culturally constructed tropes aimed to develop notions of desire and love. This leads Marmorek to give away almost totally the control of her creative process and to trust the quality of the dialogue with a universe of people who choose to play the game she established and to confide in her with their most intimate moments of love. This is not really a turning point in her work, but its continuity. If the artist used to make us break into the privacy of the women she showed us through her lens, we now become participants in a perhaps more intimate space that belongs to strangers we get to know through their stories of love won and lost.

Marmorek’s research is, of course, informed by her experience with her own love, her own desire and her own body. Indeed, has there ever been an artist that has not unsheathed their work from their experience as an individual? Yet, what’s interesting is that her modus operandi is based on never limiting her explorations to individual circumstances from each moment of her life, but on seeking to understand how these circumstances may or may not be shared by partners who contribute to the construction of the work and by spectators who fill with meaning the interaction with it.

The fact that the gaze is established as Adriana Marmorek’s methodological axis of artistic research also means that the artist managed to build an inexhaustible field of exploration. This approach will allow her not only to gradually find new questions that continually open possibilities for examination and experimentation; it will also offer the possibility of revisiting a specific aspect of desire or even a previously explored point of view from a different position, perhaps modified by time or experience or perhaps altered by its relationship with her viewers. That’s why Adriana Marmorek allows herself to be established as a narrator of desire and as a facilitator in the process of understanding the desire of all who have had the transformative experience of encountering one of her works.”

Paula Silva