Installation, photography on canvas and dolls An exhibition by visual artist Cecilia Mandrile, Argentina Venue: Makan

Artist statement: “Through traveling projects, I intend to portray impermanence. During years of moving, I was performing and recording ephemeral installations, observing cities and their crevices through a portable reference: hand made dolls. Several versions of a disguised self portrait was printed on canvas and attached to objects found or kindly given in various locations…

The process of translation has a double significance in the practice of migrant artists: translation as a means to move subjects/objects from one place or condition to another; translation as a technical means to articulate an image in order to interpret its behavior in changing contexts. Through the dual translation of photographic fragments, I propose disjointed narratives rehearsing a dialogue between portable objects and found places.

Based on a process of construction, documentation, destruction and reconstruction of fragments in different scenarios, I intend to unfold a visual language that can translate my perception of -and adaptation to- different realities as a migrant artist. Gathering, capturing, re-presenting and recording transience, the successive printing of photographic traces unveil the process that lies beneath them, a process that ‘holds’ the metaphor of the passage, a process that based on the awareness of ‘incompleteness’ constantly searches for its own language, the one that makes possible the translation of a wound.”