Hybridizations presents the most recent work of the French artist ORLAN, exhibited at the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya in Mérida, which together with the Mexican artists Lorena Ancona and Demián Flores reflect, from the aesthetics of ancient Mesoamerican cultures, on the canons of beauty, cultural exchanges, and the symbolic and material powers of native peoples in a globalized world.
I have always wanted to show to what extent the body can be an artistic, political and social medium, especially the body of women. I am interested in showing the countless beings that hide behind the self, the reinvention of the self, which allows us to be in our totality. I am not, but we are.
This is how the French artist ORLAN defines the creative process that led to her most recent series of Self-Hybridations Mayas [Maya Self-Hybridizations]. This series created specially for Hibridaciones, the exhibition curated by Leïla Godet Voight at the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya de Mérida, is introduced with the preamble Cueva Flor / Lol-tun. The earth as a body [Flower Cave / Lol–tun. The Earth As a Body] by Lorena Ancona from Quintana Roo, and put into dialogue with De/construcción de una nación [De/construction of a Nation] by Demián Flores from Oaxaca. All three artists draw inspiration from the ancient cultures to propose a reflection not only on today's diverse and plural Mexican society but more generally on canons of beauty, cultural exchanges, and the symbolic and material powers of native communities in a globalized world.
Works by ORLAN, Lorena Ancona and Demián Flores.
Lorena Ancona's practice focuses on ceramics, painting, and textiles; by exploring soils, local clays, and pigments, she questions intangible displacements of identity and forgotten traditions. Her processes reflect landscape narratives and experiences that connect archeology and nature with a particular interest in southeast Mexico, nurturing imaginaries that make sense in a territory that is drastically transformed and steeped in a climate crisis.
Demián Flores has worked in graphic arts, painting, silkscreen, and clay in which he usually mixes images of his life in Juchitan, Oaxaca in the southwest of Mexico with images related to the modernization processes of the country. He also works with images of pop culture and the archaeological imagery of the Mexican nation. He has participated in and created two artisan workshops in Oaxaca "La Curtiduría" and the workshop "Gráfica Actual".
ORLAN (born 1947) is a French artist who works with sculpture, photography, performance, video, video games, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, and scientific and medical techniques to question contemporary social phenomena. Her artistic practice opposes natural, social, and political determinism, male supremacy, religion, and cultural segregation. Always mixed with humor, sometimes with parody or even the grotesque, her work questions and challenges pre-established codes.
