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Ana Sabiá
Rituel de Patience
EXHIBITION – July 5–9, 2021
Galerie Huit Arles and IANDÉ invited the artist Ana Sabiá to share these playful moments of solitude with you.
Ana Sabiá is enchanted by the infinite possibilities of the world she discovers, she says. Photography is one of the mediums she uses for her exploratory flights. But in truth, it is the world that becomes re-enchanted through Ana Sabiá’s universe.
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This time, the enchantment comes to us through a series of self-portraits that hover at the border between documentary and fiction. In Rituel de Patience (Ritual de Paciência), Ana creates, recreates, and reinvents her melancholy, freeing us from confinement. We watched her solitary game closely, captivated by the constant transformation of her space. Each day, her camera records an immense capacity for abstraction. And we no longer know whether we are looking at photographs or sculptures confronting us with questions of feminine identity, the body, and illusion. Ana wraps us in her veils and launches us on a true journey through the intrigues of her creative freedom. And then, all of a sudden, we see ourselves in those multifaceted mirrors that produce kaleidoscopic reflections.
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Ana is a resister; she continues her daily ritual and enchants us with her mantra of resilience.
© Ana Sabiá
“For so long inside the house, I appropriated my domestic space in search of new possibilities. I built partitions and walls out of sheets and, as if by magic, there was an entirely new world inside this home. Since then, this ‘parallel universe’ has been the stage for the photographic fabulations of the series Jogo de Paciência (Game of Patience), where I seek to meld the antagonisms between fictive reality and realistic fiction, in direct reference to a surrealist aesthetic. It begins with the choice of black-and-white photography and a substantial range of greys. This removal of visible, colored reality recalls the early days of photography but, above all, suspends linear temporality. The set defines a surreal scene for the characters and cherished objects. Sometimes the ‘infinite backdrop’ asserts a spatial displacement where everything is suspended:
there are no walls, no floors, no ceilings, and the elements endlessly try to rearrange themselves, framed by crumpled whiteness.”
ANA SABIÁ
About the Artist
Ana Sabiá is a visual artist, researcher, and photography professor.
Her photographic research and practice explore the body, surrealism, and self-representation to address themes such as feminisms, identities, poetry, literature, and autobiography. She holds a PhD in Visual Arts, an MA in Social Psychology, and a BA in Art Education.