AD MINOLITI Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush 24 July 2021 — 8 May 2022
AD MINOLITI USES GEOMETRY AND COLOUR AS A TOOL FOR CREATING ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSES AND SPECULATIVE PICTORIAL FICTION INFLUENCED BY FEMINIST AND QUEER THOUGHT.
Minoliti trained as a painter and draws on the rich legacy of geometric abstraction in Latin America, such as Argentina’s Arte Madí and the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención. Both founded in 1945, they embraced playfulness in their work and worked with irregular shaped canvases, sometimes experimenting with three-dimensional objects.
Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush intends to work in the opposite direction to Biosphere 2. Its environment has been conceived as a community centre open to all, offering a space for intersectional feminist education and fantasy. The exhibition proposes encounter and lingering spaces for visitors amongst the artist’s works.
Minoliti approaches painting as an expanded field that meets design and functionality. Through this approach, the space of the gallery is considered as a tri‑dimensional canvas in which to explore a dialogue between modernism, science-fiction, animalism, fetish, queer feminism, non-ableism, art education, toys, architecture, and design. They assume painting not as a mere material practice, but rather as a visual set of ideas to represent and investigate non-human heterotopias away from binary thinking or heteronormative categories of sexuality. Throughout their work, geometrical forms and hybrid scenery serve to imagine beyond-the-human settings in which queer feminism, the animal dimension and childhood can be applied to an open interpretation of painting, design, and art history beyond binary categorisations.
Including 15 new paintings, the exhibition presents a selection of 11 works from the Fable (Butterflies and Flowers) series and four paintings from the Space Playset series. These works have all been painted in the artist’s usual playful and biomorphic style. They create a digital image that is printed on canvas, which is then hand-painted. This layering of digital and human applications, deepens the colour and blurs the line between human and machine. Minoliti conceives these works as cyborg paintings.
Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush has been conceived as a critical speculation of Biosphere 2, the world’s largest Earth science experiment launched in 1984, in the Arizona desert. Funded by oil tycoon, Ed Bass, Biosphere 2 was created to study whether or not humans could create and sustain life in an artificial environment such as space stations. B2’s team tried — consequently failing — to isolate eight people (four women and four men, all white Americans and one European) for two years. This monumental experiment is a perfect example of the space race being an extractivist colonising endeavour, enhancing the interests of the already powerful — including major economic and military institutions — and exacerbating pre-existing detrimental processes such as wars, economic inequality, and environmental degradation.
The exhibition features Minoliti’s ongoing project The Feminist School of Painting, transforming part of the gallery space into an active classroom. Through bi-weekly painting workshops, the school will deconstruct historical narratives and reimagine the traditional genre of landscape painting from a feminist, intersectional and queer perspective. In partnership with a multidisciplinary group of artists, academics, writers, and activists, the workshops will revaluate the structure of art education and promote accessibility, creativity and curiosity over any art-specific expertise. Minoliti considers the subject of landscape in its expanded form, from natural or human-made features, to outer-space and imaginary settings. The genre of landscape, is an important tool used in colonisation. Minoliti has said that ‘landscape as a pictorial genre was used to promote the colonial invasion of America and recent movies about Mars exploration exhibit many of the same structures.’ Building on the artist’s interest in shedding light on feminist and queer artistic practice, Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush also includes an international library of queer and feminist zines, which will grow during the course of the exhibition.
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EXHIBITION GUIDE
The Feminist School of Painting
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021 Acrylic on canvas
Gati, 2019 (Cat) Furry mask, gloves, tail and clothes and bag on mannequin, metal hardware, glass
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Zorrx, 2019 (Wolf) Furry mask, gloves, tail and clothes and bag on mannequin, metal hardware, glass
Osx, 2021 (Dog) Furry mask, gloves, tail and clothes and bag on mannequin, metal hardware, glass. With sweatshirt art by Lam Hoi Sin
Space Playset, 2021 Acrylic on canvas
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Space Playset series In this series, each painting represents a space fantasy. The series is a development from Minoliti’s Dollhouse series in which each painting represents a dollhouse room. In both series the artist critically considers the question of gendered toys and the marketisation of reductive heteronormative play for children. Space Playset was inspired by recent toys that attempt to promote STEM subjects for girls, such as Luciana — an astronaut doll with a very expensive spaceship. Minoliti pledges for fantasy and play accessible to all, away from binary constructions of gender and a capitalist co-option of feminism. This series continues Minoliti’s interest in the relationship of gender and science, and it is in dialogue with their work Geometries in Space (2019), for which they imagined space exploration and space colonies of the future, free of patriarchal domination.
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers) series In this series Minoliti develops a language around nature, using motifs such as flowers and butterflies. The artist was inspired by the introduction of Sarah Kay — a fictional character created by Australian artist Vivien Kubbos, which represented the simple joys of childhood, friendship, love and kindness — to the Argentinian context in the 1970s, as a way to promote heteronormative and domestic values for Argentinian women. At the time, Argentina lived under a violent and repressive regime that disappeared young mothers, and abducted their children to give them to pro-regime families. In this series, Minoliti uses geometrical shapes as a way to re-appropriate the tender values promoted by Sarah Kay, whilst associating them to a non-binary context that strips away any human references.
Furries Osx with sweatshirt art by Lam Hoi Sin (2019) Gati (2019) Zorrx (2019) All: Furry mask, gloves, tail and clothes and bag on mannequin, metal hardware, glass. With the Furries, Minoliti introduces a nonhuman element to transform the gallery into an alternative universe where furry beings become inhabitants of the Biosphere Plush. Minoliti originally introduced mannequins in their work as supports to show painting on clothing. Within the context of their installations, the mannequins become creatures in-between worlds and the Furries’ heads add a mutant, animal dimension.
Ad Minoliti: Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush is curated by Irene Aristizábal, BALTIC’s Head of Curatorial and Public Practice. The exhibition is a collaboration with Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours, France, where Ad Minoliti will present a solo exhibition in October 2021 — March 2022. A new monograph will be published in 2021 in collaboration with CCCOD, Tours; Galerie Crêvecoeur, Paris; Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Puerto Rico; and Peres Projects, Berlin.
With thanks to:
Soft Seating Experts 6
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GLOSSARY Animalism
Extractivism
A personal identity theory that asserts that Extractivism is a system of social, economic humans are animals of the species Homo sapiens. and geopolitical relations that is characterised by the exploitation of natural resources by extractive industries (such as mining or oil Heterotopias production), and of people, for example The idea of heterotopia was created by French historically enslaved peoples or contemporary philosopher Michel Foucault to describe precarious workers. cultural, institutional and imagined spaces that are somehow ‘other’: disturbing, intense, Colonisation incompatible, contradictory or transforming. Heterotopia follows the template established Colonisation is the act of sending people to live by the notions of utopia and dystopia. in and govern another country. It is a practice The prefix hetero, from Ancient Greek means of domination, which involves the subjugation other or different. It is combined with the Greek of one people to another. The term colony for place. Together they mean ‘other place’. comes from the Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. This root reminds us that colonisation usually involves the transfer of population to Heteronormative a new territory, where the arrivals live as Relating to a worldview that promotes permanent settlers while maintaining political heterosexuality as the ‘normal’ or default allegiance to their country of origin. sexual orientation. Heteronormativity suggests or believes that only heterosexual relationships are ‘normal’ or right, and that men and women have naturally different roles in society.
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