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Ad Minoliti: Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush
Please take with you after use
Ad minoliti uses geometry and colour as a tool for creating
alternative universes and speculative pictorial fiction influenced
by feminist and queer thought.
Minoliti trained as a painter and draws on the rich legacy of
geometric abstraction in Latin America, such as Argentina’s
Arte Madí and the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención. Both
founded in 1945, they embraced playfulness in their work and
worked with irregular shaped canvases, sometimes
experimenting with three-dimensional objects.
Minoliti approaches painting as an expanded field that meets
design and functionality. Through this approach, the space of
the gallery is considered as a tri-dimensional canvas in which to
explore a dialogue between modernism, science-fiction,
animalism, fetish, queer feminism, non-ableism, art education,
toys, architecture, and design. They assume painting not as a
mere material practice, but rather as a visual set of ideas to
represent and investigate non-human heterotopias away from
binary thinking or heteronormative categories of sexuality.
Throughout their work, geometrical forms and hybrid scenery
serve to imagine beyond-the-human settings in which queer
feminism, the animal dimension and childhood can be applied
to an open interpretation of painting, design, and art history
beyond binary categorisations.
Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush has been conceived as a
critical speculation of Biosphere 2, the world’s largest Earth
science experiment launched in 1984, in the Arizona desert.
Funded by oil tycoon, Ed Bass, Biosphere 2 was created to
study whether or not humans could create and sustain life in an
artificial environment such as space stations. B2’s team tried —
consequently failing — to isolate eight people (four women and
four men, all white Americans and one European) for two
years. This monumental experiment is a perfect example of the
space race being an extractivist colonising endeavour,
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enhancing the interests of the already powerful — including
major economic and military institutions — and exacerbating
pre-existing detrimental processes such as wars, economic
inequality, and environmental degradation.
Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush intends to work in the
opposite direction to Biosphere 2. Its environment has been
conceived as a community centre open to all, offering a space
for intersectional feminist education and fantasy. The exhibition
proposes encounter and lingering spaces for visitors amongst
the artist’s works.
Including 15 new paintings, the exhibition presents a selection
of 11 works from the Fable (Butterflies and Flowers) series
and four paintings from the Space Playset series. These works
have all been painted in the artist’s usual playful and
biomorphic style. They create a digital image that is printed on
canvas, which is then hand-painted. This layering of digital and
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human applications, deepens the colour and blurs the line
between human and machine. Minoliti conceives these works
as cyborg paintings.
The exhibition features Minoliti’s ongoing project The Feminist
School of Painting, transforming part of the gallery space into
an active classroom. Through bi-weekly painting workshops,
the school will deconstruct historical narratives and reimagine
the traditional genre of landscape painting from a feminist,
intersectional and queer perspective. In partnership with a
multidisciplinary group of artists, academics, writers, and
activists, the workshops will revaluate the structure of art
education and promote accessibility, creativity and curiosity
over any art-specific expertise.
Minoliti considers the subject of landscape in its expanded
form, from natural or human-made features, to outer-space and
imaginary settings. The genre of landscape, is an important tool
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used in colonisation. Minoliti has said that ‘landscape as a
pictorial genre was used to promote the colonial invasion of
America and recent movies about Mars exploration exhibit
many of the same structures.’
Building on the artist’s interest in shedding light on feminist and
queer artistic practice, Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush
also includes an international library of queer and feminist
zines, which will grow during the course of the exhibition.
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Exhibition Guide:
Gati, 2019 (Cat)
Furry mask, gloves, tail and clothes and bag on mannequin,
metal hardware, glass
Zorrx, 2019 (Wolf)
Furry mask, gloves, tail and clothes and bag on mannequin,
metal hardware, glass
Osx, 2021 (Dog)
Furry mask, gloves, tail and clothes and bag on mannequin,
metal hardware, glass. With sweatshirt art by Lam Hoi Sin
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Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
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Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
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Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
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Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
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Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
11
Fable (Butterflies and Flowers), 2021
Acrylic on canvas
Space Playset, 2021 Acrylic on canvas
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Space Playset series
In this series, each painting represents a space fantasy. The
series is a development from Minoliti’s Dollhouse series in
which each painting represents a dollhouse room. In both
series the artist critically considers the question of gendered
toys and the marketisation of reductive heteronormative play for
children. Space Playset was inspired by recent toys that
attempt to promote STEM subjects for girls, such as Luciana —
an astronaut doll with a very expensive spaceship. Minoliti
pledges for fantasy and play accessible to all, away from binary
constructions of gender and a capitalist co-option of feminism.
This series continues Minoliti’s interest in the relationship of
gender and science, and it is in dialogue with their work
Geometries in Space (2019), for which they imagined space
exploration and space colonies of the future, free of patriarchal
domination.
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Fable (Butterflies and Flowers) series
In this series Minoliti develops a language around nature, using
motifs such as flowers and butterflies. The artist was inspired
by the introduction of Sarah Kay — a fictional character created
by Australian artist Vivien Kubbos, which represented the
simple joys of childhood, friendship, love and kindness — to the
Argentinian context in the 1970s, as a way to promote
heteronormative and domestic values for Argentinian women.
At the time, Argentina lived under a violent and repressive
regime that disappeared young mothers, and abducted their
children to give them to pro-regime families.
In this series, Minoliti uses geometrical shapes as a way to re-
appropriate the tender values promoted by Sarah Kay, whilst
associating them to a non-binary context that strips away any
human references.
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Furries
Osx with sweatshirt art by Lam Hoi Sin (2019)
Gati (2019)
Zorrx (2019)
All: Furry mask, gloves, tail and clothes and bag on mannequin,
metal hardware, glass.
With the Furries, Minoliti introduces a non-human element to
transform the gallery into an alternative universe where furry
beings become inhabitants of the Biosphere Plush.
Minoliti originally introduced mannequins in their work as
supports to show painting on clothing. Within the context of
their installations, the mannequins become creatures in-
between worlds and the Furries’ heads add a mutant, animal
dimension.
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Ad Minoliti: Biosfera Peluche / Biosphere Plush is curated by
Irene Aristizábal, BALTIC’s Head of Curatorial and Public
Practice. The exhibition is a collaboration with Centre de
Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours, France, where
Ad Minoliti will present a solo exhibition in October 2021 —
March 2022.
A new monograph will be published in 2021 in collaboration
with CCCOD, Tours; Galerie Crêvecoeur, Paris; Galería
Agustina Ferreyra, Puerto Rico; and Peres Projects, Berlin.
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Glossary
Animalism
A personal identity theory that asserts that humans are animals
of the species Homo sapiens.
Heterotopias
The idea of heterotopia was created by French philosopher
Michel Foucault to describe cultural, institutional and imagined
spaces that are somehow ‘other’: disturbing, intense,
incompatible, contradictory or transforming. Heterotopia follows
the template established by the notions of utopia and dystopia.
The prefix hetero, from Ancient Greek means other or different.
It is combined with the Greek for place. Together they mean
‘other place’.
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Heteronormative
Relating to a worldview that promotes heterosexuality as the
‘normal’ or default sexual orientation. Heteronormativity
suggests or believes that only heterosexual relationships are
‘normal’ or right, and that men and women have naturally
different roles in society.
Extractivism
Extractivism is a system of social, economic and geopolitical
relations that is characterised by the exploitation of natural
resources by extractive industries (such as mining or oil
production), and of people, for example historically enslaved
peoples or contemporary precarious workers.
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Colonisation
Colonisation is the act of sending people to live in and govern
another country. It is a practice of domination, which involves
the subjugation of one people to another. The term colony
comes from the Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. This root
reminds us that colonisation usually involves the transfer of
population to a new territory, where the arrivals live as
permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their
country of origin.
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