Sur Gallery “Warrior from the Andes” Claudia Bernal 🇨🇴 (Art Encounter)
I had the great honour of meeting Claudia Bernal, a multidisciplinary artist, ranging from visual art material such as video and photography, as well as textile printing, drawing, and theatrical performance. Most importantly, she is a Colombian artist that has developed her artistic practice for 30 years in Canada, and she is an Arts professor in UQAC (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi). In her first solo exhibition, she points out the neglect and invisibility the context of Canada pushes onto her body and her practice, as a colonized, migrant subject.
Juanita Arango, personal photograph of La transparencia sólida (2015), Claudia Bernal, September 26 2024, Sur Gallery, Toronto.
Significance of Hair and the Role of Women in the Colombian context (domesticity, armed violence, literature, femininity, sex work)
She talked my friend Samadhi and I through her inclusion of hair in many of her pieces. She explained the symbolism behind it which I find interesting to the Latinx context and her self-conception of Latinx women. The hair, cobalt black and long, and straight, she identifies as Latin American, Brown women, maybe based on herself, and she finds a tension between the femininity ascribed to it, especially long hair seen in espacios machistas/patriarchal space as the ideal, as well as related to violence, where it can be instrumentalized by men, to pull from it and harm. It is both angry and beautiful.
OPENING PERFORMANCE
I took notes from the breathtaking performance Claudia did, based on the title of the exhibition, using a thick coat of what looked like a sheep skin and fur, that had dyed fibers in red and blue, looking like veins coming out of the fur.
Performance:
1) crawls
2) gets up
3) flies
- she activates the condores background of charcoal/ink - they’re flying with her OR she is one of them
- analogy to migrating (flock of condores from the Andes)
- she activates the cape with the performance
- she’s really immersed in the character/performance that makes it so emotional, painful, and hopeful at the same time
4) wears the cape (her skin) - finally has become the warrior
5) sits down in chair and leaves cape behind (muda piel?)
6) arrastra carbon hacia cajones de una mesa
- lo guarda
- que es el carbon
The coal makes me think of my (Coal)lapse (2023) installation piece that refers to the destructive coal mining in Colombia, El Cerrejon, that impacts not only the environment tremendously, but the health and land of Indigenous communities in the region (Wayùu community in La Guajira), all sponsored by US imperialism and capitalist interests.
Reflection
Claudia Bernal’s exhibition really resonates with my thesis focus on migration, diaspora, and resistance. Her use of the diasporic body as a site of contestation and transformation echoes my focus on cultural hybridity and the politics of place-making within the Latinx Diaspora. Both projects emphasize the struggle for visibility and belonging in a settler colonial context that marginalizes and invisibilizes diasporic bodies and narratives.
As an essential part of the work I want to produce, the body and the land as parallel, interconnected forces, the ideas Bernal brings forward in this exhibition reinforce my thesis’s emphasis on the body as a contested site of identity, memory, and resistance, while also providing new dimensions for exploring gender and environmental violence within diasporic narratives, as seen in her performance and use of site-specific, natural materials.
Bernal’s work challenges the neglect of Latinx identities in the Canadian art context, a struggle important to underscore in my work, with the purpose of being a bridge for community and cultural understanding. This exhibition reinforces the importance of centering diasporic voices and their complex, layered experiences in conversations about art, identity, and resistance.
Bibliography
Toledo, Tamara. “Warrior from the Andes.” Sur Gallery, 2024. https://www.surgalleryvirtual.ca/
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