Livia Daza-Paris
At the Edge of the (far-)End
February 6th - March 2nd, 2013
Reception: Saturday March 2nd 4-7pm
At the Edge of the (far-)End is a solo exhibition that presents part of an ongoing archive of poetic forensics recently developed by Daza-Paris. This archive considers the autobiographical embedded within the larger context of human-rights themes. Daza-Paris worked with her body and a camera as witness, as she searches for the body of her father, who was disappeared by the state in the 1960’s, in Venezuela. Guided by the feminist premise that "the personal is political", “I” becomes evidence and “self” is where the story resides—indeed, the only irrevocable proof of her father's existence is herself.
The exhibition presents works from two series of investigative art: The Book of Waiting and from Antigone, Rituales Dobles.
The Book of Waiting is a series of diaristic videos that plays with cadence of movement and cadence of thought —between the imagined, the remembered and the real— to conceptually explore how something deep and elusive in the body, such as complicated grief, might be made visible. This series anticipates a finding of truth.
Antigone, Rituales Dobles is an on-going series of ritual-actions in which Daza-Paris offers tribute to the ideological humanist integrity in the Venezuelan resistance movement of the 1960s. Most importantly, in this work, Daza-Paris confronts a violation of burial rites and consecrates the dismissed body of her father Iván Daza, as she creates metaphorical markings on his last route before being ambushed and disappeared.