What Lies Beneath: Miami

What Lies Beneath proposes a journey through territories of becoming, where identities emerge as fluid processes in constant transformation. The exhibition weaves together works that explore the body as a sensitive archive, as a space of memory and metamorphosis, where gestures and performative actions appear as strategies of transformation. Repetition and ritual traverse the exhibition: from imperceptible footprints to traces of movement etched in mirrors, creating a dialogue where the strange becomes familiar and the boundaries between body and matter blur.

The works resonate with each other through formal and conceptual tensions: the rigid and the malleable, the organic and the mechanical, the visible and what lies beneath. In this landscape of mobile identities, materiality plays a fundamental role: mud that records time, membranes that exude, reflections that multiply gesture. The exhibition thus configures itself as a living organism where each piece proposes its own archaeology of the present, creating a space where the unspeakable finds form and what lies beneath emerges to the surface.

A mud path crosses the first gallery room, materializing Elizabet Cerviño's ritual, who walks barefoot between water and earth. The artist repeats this action for an hour, weaving a trail that consolidates with each step, like an ephemeral writing of time that gains presence and texture as the pilgrimage advances. This exploration of traces and movement records dialogues with her piece Canteras: Testimonios de la brisa (2023), where the artist captures another form of passage and writing: the invisible trace of wind over landscape, like a natural calligraphy emerging from the interaction between atmosphere and territory.

Honoring the Treaties (2017) documents the journey of Iván Sikic and Paul Cannon along the ancient Wickquasgeck route in Manhattan, a twelve-mile trading path of the Lenape people now partially converted into Broadway. In silence, Cannon walks backward wearing traditional attire from his Kumeyaay Ipai tribe, while Sikic applies gold leaf to his body, evoking the Kintsugi technique as a metaphor for healing and resilience. The work is part of a series of performances where Sikic collaborates with indigenous artists and refugees, exploring histories of displacement and cultural dispossession.

İz Öztat navigates territories of desire and memory in her watercolors from Dead Reckoning to Her Folds (2021-2023). Through abstract sculptural forms, the artist questions normative representations of the female body, creating a visual language where longing and loss generate formal tensions between objects and their representation.

Eva Fàbregas's Exudantes sculptures pulse like living organisms in space. Their parasitic forms emerge and breathe, recalling bodily anatomies whose wrinkled membranes result from the ritual of inflation and deflation during the material's drying process. Fàbregas works with malleability and the sensorial, allowing these forms to transmit affects through their material presence.

Zeynep Kayan's photographic installation explores repetition as a resource for integrating the strange into the body. The artist rehearses the bond with a foreign element that adheres through subtle movements, creating new contours. Through the repetition of mundane gestures, Kayan generates temporary states of resemblance where body and object merge, losing their original functions to become pure matter.

Liz Capote's Furia (2023) confronts us with fragmented bodies in a visual essay on current moral and political violence. In a landscape of ochre tones, pink figures float and dissolve while green organic forms coil like invasive vegetation. The apparent chromatic serenity contrasts with the tension of dismembered bodies, which, suspended in perpetual metamorphosis, create a narrative where violence and transformation coexist. Through these floating figures and serpentine vegetation, Capote explores identity and existential conflict, turning the body into a fluid symbol of resistance and transmutation.

Invoking the Metal Woman character from Metropolis (1927), Bengolea creates Maria's Transformation (2022), a work that explores the attraction to manufactured objects and their alchemical memory. Her 3D avatar composes an inventory of steel elements that build and threaten our history, fusing the roughness of metal with a choreography that oscillates between the mechanical and the fluid. The piece reflects Bengolea's multidisciplinary practice, where dance becomes a tool for social and spiritual exploration, interweaving modern movements with ritual gestures from Afro-Caribbean traditions and industrial sequences.

In Rehearsed, Mirrored (2024), Isaac Chong etches traces of movement in mirrors and glass. The etched lines capture the blurriness of movement in its successive stages, revealing the emotional interconnection of bodies that embrace, hide, lift, and support each other. The traces of dancing bodies generate an incessant flow of falling and rising, transforming the vulnerability of falling into a choreography of collective support. Like a dance score, the cut-out figures and their dense lines elude tangibility, oscillating between the figurative and the abstract under the play of light that alters their visibility, proposing alternative microcosms of human relationality.

In Framing (2022-2025), Elena Dahn explores the tension between process and form through a visceral dance with material. Latex, like a second skin, becomes testimony to a physical encounter between two bodies that seek and tear each other, creating forms that evoke organic openings and folds. The work operates in that liminal space where movement momentarily freezes: a portal, a wound, a birth. The marks on the elastic surface - tensions, tears, stretches - speak of an intimacy both violent and tender, like the trauma and beauty of childbirth. The piece exists in that threshold where two forces meet, leaving traces of their struggle on a membrane that, like skin itself, records every gesture of its becoming form.

by Direlia Lazo

For further information please contact Gladys Garrote via gladys@zilbermangallery.com