Amongst them, Mauricio Limón... The Mexican artist, based between Amsterdam and Paris, focuses his work around margins, particularly the margins of society. Analysing anthropological, political and social structures of specific groups, Mauricio Limón presents the result of his research through video, paintings, drawings, performance and objects.
Inspired by the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Hegel, and Lacan, Mauricio Limón presents here Performing White Skin, a group of wooden masks inspired by his "background with the Mexican masks that I have seen in popular festivities, museums and street markets since I was a kid; the African masks and their connexion with the symbolic order and the hierarchies of the western neoliberal society in which we are living (post-colonial domination of peripheral countries, for example)."
Performing White Skin © Mauricio Limon, wildpalms & Galeria Hilario Galguera.
Made as "a satire on arrogance, high academy manners, class status, social position, and the use of language to submit the individual drives into the belt of dialogue/demagogy", this work focus on "the established political-cultural-economic system which presumes to tell the truth, and to perform the truth from an historical condition."
But beyond this, Mauricio Limón "proposes a reflexion on visibility and non visibility of social class systems which promote a proclamation of superiority”. Through the use of masks, video and an upcoming performance, the artist explores “a range of hierarchies and the ramifications of capitalist society; a sort of lottery of the cultural system."
"During the process of development and creation, I usually find ways to connect bridges between social hierarchies, exploring the subjectivity of the people with whom I work through different narratives."
This article is part of POPPOSITIONS BRUSSELS | FIVE ARTISTS TO OPEN YOUR EYES.
