At Kunstverein Kevin Area, of their first solo exhibition in Austria, Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino presents a collection of latest works and unfolds a succession of interlinked trajectories centered on a posh operation of inventive labor. Even when—or principally as a result of—they select abstraction as a considerably of a refusal to figurative illustration, the artist ponders and traces the theoretical, biographical, and historic analysis that informs their observe along with the intricate, fluctuating obscure traits, and productions of worth in up to date artwork that mirrors the institutionalization of latest society in relation to the colonial transatlantic undertaking.

A rating piece signed as Peso (the Portuguese phrase for weight, from which the exhibition borrows its title) reads “the artist’s physique weight in municipal water” and instructions an motion that takes up a lot of the tangible house within the present. On this work, steel canisters organized in multiples of 4 and eight compose quasi-cubic items that maintain the desired materials with explicit consideration to its native, regulated supply. Adopting the type of a grid, its celebration of calculation, floor, and abstraction is juxtaposed with the particularity and heftiness of a attribute of the artist’s physique that’s without delay quantifiable and can’t be captured absolutely. In a manner, Peso (2024) speaks to navigations between visibility and opacity, going through the growing calls for for consumable identification and the hazards and reductions that include it–to see artwork (in addition to our bodies and the world per se) via pre-established ideas, measuring it in opposition to and substitute it with what we already know. On the similar time, its geometrical options might give sufficient house for different issues, together with its semblance to the canisters carried by the artist’s dad and mom of their childhood with water collected from a river to provide the actions of their properties on the time.

Peso, coincidentally the foreign money title in varied former colonies of the Spanish empire, can also be a standard time period used to confer with cash in hip-hop tradition. With the exhibition, Celestino’s explorations are positioned not merely within the complicated financial and social inscriptions and transactions of energy that artwork is embedded in but in addition within the latter’s determinations within the website and the act of studying inventive work. In creating the exhibition in shut collaboration with their dad and mom, the artist challenges a capability to stretch their very own company within the materials decisions right here.

By portray the ceiling of the exhibition house with a shade chosen by their mom and broadcasting the one licensed radio station of their hometown, Buritizeiro, in Brazil, they emphasize language as a essential ingredient of their observe and announce the susceptibility of using the instrumentality of interpretation. Actively refusing to suggest site-specific iterations and as an alternative bringing written sentences which can be, one can discover, as exact as they’re open, Wisrah implies the potential of a number of incidences of the identical piece and, too, strips their full management over the fabric translation of data (whether or not that’s the content material of the radio channel, their mom’s subjective selection of shade, or, their very own present physique weight). This mental train of amassing info moderately than commodities is disturbed by Trophy (2024), an award statue gained by the artist for a poetry competitors in center college, the one object introduced from Brazil to Austria to be a part of the present. Pointed in direction of the exhibition house, this work arguably presents an oxymoron on the coronary heart of mediation of distinction via language: particularly, the impossibility of representational thought transgressing itself.

Whereas the songs traversing the house via the open door hole and the fluctuant chromic info that fills the house’s ceiling are visceral and perceptible parts,” a set of native vegetation which can be invasive elsewhere” are made absent from the precise exhibition website and are positioned within the hall and the backyard of the constructing whereby Kevin is positioned. Virtually inaccessible to the general public, Present (2024) invitations a mirrored image to look into the context, political and in any other case, the place the artwork group is positioned with an (unrequested) current to the residents of the constructing it fronts whereas, too, alluding to the native, historic, and resiliently current continuities of colonialism inside which the exhibition exists.

at Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna
till November 2, 2024