PIEL
PIEL (‘skin’ in Spanish) creates a platform for bringing together work by artists that explore the value we place on our skin.
Santiago Sierra creates a space for us to consider the easy transformation of individuals into consumer goods. Through a simple, but effective act of tattooing a line across the backs of his participants in ‘160 line tattooed on 4 People’, he underlines the reality of their day-to-day life, our complicit role as spectators – and that of the art world who paid for it.
Through tattooing his name and ID number onto his skin, David Peréz Karmadavis and his fellow participants make a stand against the socio-political conditions in Guatemala, where Police bureaucracy stands in for incompetence in tracing the bodies of the disappeared.
In ‘Piel/Skin’, Regina José Galindo effectively eliminates the outside markers of her femininity as she shaves all her body hair at the 49th Venice Biennale. In the hope of investigating her own vulnerability, she walks naked through the city’s streets.
PIEL is a contemporary response to ‘Skin Digging’ and forms part of the exhibition.
Artworks by artists in this show can also be found in the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America.
To find out more, visit www.escala.org
