6.19

That point

"The most unbearable objects attracted my attention to the delicacy of human feelings."

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

The ribs of a dead animal, staked to a stick, cooking on the fire about to be roasted. On the front sidewalk there is a stained glass window that reflects the image and adds a flowerbed. This encounter is photographed and the result looks like a painting by Chaim Soutine dripping with colorful flowers.

Nora Aslan poses in these encounters. It gives value to the strange, to everything that is difficult to digest. He stands on the broken and plays with the parts that cut, which can continue to break, and looks for a way to do something new. There is no attempt to fix, it does not seek the norm or the return to an order as if there were a correct direction. It always subverts.

It would be naive in this context not to ask ourselves about the value of the gaze of a female artist towards the spaces of the peripheral, towards those forms that oscillate between the monstrous and the kitsch, which frighten and sometimes repel, but which at the same time can be extremely attractive. A look that over time points out those margins, takes them and brings them to the fore in a syntax that shows the teeth.
That border between the seductive and the marginal, that always looking to other sides and the difficulty in trying to categorize and locate her production according to discipline, current or tradition, is a mark in Nora Aslan's work. A brand that indicates other ways, other possible ways, that raises the difference, that space “between” (that characteristic that makes a person or something different from another), as a space to be explored, as a way of being in relationship to the world.

Dolphins
Silica gel is a granular and porous form that due to its chemical qualities is water absorbent, for this reason it is used to reduce humidity in closed spaces. When the gel has been saturated with water, it can be regenerated. According to the amount of moisture absorbed, the gel varies variably from blue to pink, thus indicating the variation in moisture in the medium. Memories or souvenirs that change color depending on the weather and are still common in Mar del Plata and other beaches on the coast are covered with this material: sea lions, owls, virgins, boats, seahorses, fish or dolphins.

Result of the meeting of a set of conditions, these objects change color. It is not the same to put the dolphin in the library of a house in Buenos Aires or on the edge of a window facing the sea. There is a precise point where these conditions allow the object to provide certain information, in this case a climate prediction from a kitsch object.

In 1945 Merleau Ponty wrote Phenomenology of perception, a theory that focuses on the fact that perceptual experience is always the experience of structures understood as an interactive set of parts and relationships. For the author, things are captured in relation to the body scheme, that is to say, the senses are built from the relationships we establish with the body.
This complex system of interrelationships that from her perspective is the one that gives essence to things, bodies, senses, allows us to establish a way of reading Nora Aslan's work and think about encounters that anchor at a certain moment.

That point in this case is tricky, the idea of ​​one who is only one in his relationship with others. There is no hierarchy. Each point is that, unique and repeated, like those souvenirs on display, which together and in series, despite their supposed parity, reflect qualities inherent to their state, act as a thermometer and mutate according to minimal variables.

This exhibition brings together a body of works by Nora Aslan, who, far from aspiring to a totality that looks back, brings into space a system that in its own logic establishes a mode of expansion. A germ that multiplies but always maintains a constant that does not adapt to a single form or fashion.

In the opposite direction to a linear and chronological approach, we present a space without borders, the idea of ​​an organic system that in different dimensions proposes a game in the direction of gazes.

Multiplication as a gesture:
The strangeness and the sinister in an obsessive collection of images. First they were clippings, news images and media. The work as an object in the world is in relation to the information it contains. They are witnesses of time. They have history on the skin. Nora redoubled the gesture, and moved to her own lens. From the media to your own photos. This passage reveals another logic, the multiplication is infinite and when repeated it generates another state. The work is that meeting, which was collage, in the most traditional sense of technique, cutting, superimposing and reformulating in the act of putting the pieces together, and now it expands and invades the physical space. Perhaps replicating something of the voracious sense in the use and circulation of images on social networks.

From there to infinity: hands, feet, heads, animals, cities, museums, water, glass, houses, plants and the capitoné point. That point from where everything radiates and is organized. Point of convergence. By way of syntax, these points determine cadence, rhythm like verses in a poem. They also enclose the history of bodies, spaces, and put pressure on a focus, as if wanting to leave a mark. Nora photographs them in the antipodes of their splendor. Play with the brand idea, think about the passage of time and the alterations.

The focus on the fracture:
A broken basin kicks off. The idea of ​​break as the beginning of a work that is currently being produced. The failure of systems such as the access door and the watchful eye. Witness still watching.

Distortion as a gesture, pieces that invite for their plot and close up contain images that expel, violent and perverse. Fragments that oscillate between pleasure and horror: the ribbons of a bow, the edges of a lip, the stain of a melanoma or the plastic legs of a doll.

Death as part. In a notebook full of quotes, Nora writes: The corpse is not the totality of an animal, is collage a form of death? The cut, the incision, the exclusion, a taxidermy of images. The skin of a dead animal is hugged to an empty car. It climbs or hangs as we want to think about it. Fear and truce.

That body:
Defined by her relationship with doing, Nora constructs a gaze that points out the uncomfortable, what no one wants to look at: the ugly, the monstrous, what does not fit and dislocate. Your body in space determines coordinates that establish a point. Small signs that organize readings. Foci of sense. Pauses

Disectratus, an aseptic and cold steel table contains all the measurements of Nora, a domestic object, tattooed with organic references, it is the center of a larger set, that table, that work, that body, that point is the one that acts as the axis and it is measured with its time. She as the center articulates a larger system that makes sense in the particular as well as in the whole.
Thus a system is established around the direction of gazes. Yours as a starting point, cut out, photograph and collect. That of its witnesses, hundreds of eyes that repeat, reproduce and look. They look at her work, they look at her, they look at us while time unfolds senses.

The prefix trans refers to the idea of ​​a movement that goes from one side to another or is located next to or after something. What is between, what passes through all or what is beyond. A spatiality and the way in which we perceive ourselves in that relationship. Taken to discipline, it refers to categories that are not hierarchically organized: they coexist and make sense in relation to the object they address. Transdiscipline is the daughter of the growing imperfections in the dominant ways of constructing knowledge. Nora Aslan's work is strained in this prefix and is located on the edges of many disciplines without belonging entirely to any. The wealth is there, in his way of punctuating the infinite multiplication, in his way of being in relation to others and above all in the ability to always build new coordinates. She is like the dolphin of Mar del Plata, now in Córdoba, we hope to see if it is blue, purple or pink.
Maria Alejandra Gatti