Karina Skvirsky Aguilera
Sunday, 10 March 2019
Work from Folds in the Photograph at DPM Gallery.
“We can understand the work of Karina Skvirsky Aguilera as the mechanism through which she seeks to continuously discover the profiles of her own identity, within the complex plot of ethnicity, gender, customs and family mythology woven around her experiences within the dissimilar cultural stadiums that have marked it. We refer to the two matrices of origin that determine it as an individual, and that appear here and there in their works in permanent tension. On the one hand, the afro roots of its Ecuadorian motherland, whose tales of childhood and childhood memories serve as a substrate to explore the paradoxes and the failure of the modern that surpasses the local microcosm, pairing this up with an investigation into the inadequate but subsisting notion of “race” and its social interpretations. And on the other hand the discordant signals of the advances of the North American society where his thought was born and modeled (within a family of Russian-Jewish migrants), which have tensed to the breaking point the paradigm of political correctness that regulated the speech in North America, and that Donald Trump’s access to power puts in doubt.
In this work we understand that identity politics are not simple but faceted, multidimensional and tailored to each human experience, which is irreducibly unique. If its production is effective as a lens through which to look at the complexity of the social constructs that shape us, it is because in the first instance it speaks of it as an unrepeatable singularity. His work exemplifies that desire of each one to trace his own existential interrogation to find a niche in the world; it is a journey that starts from the open analysis of his intimate experience, which goes from the events of his upbringing to continuous observations about his life in order to achieve a fit with the grand scheme of things…” – excerpted from the exhibition text by Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers.