Aura Nera. Curated by Oriol Fontdevila

Regina de Miguel
Arts Santa Mònica
10.10.1608.01.17
Press
Press release

In Hell, Dante comes across King Minos sitting in judgment over the souls according to divine law. There, in the second circle of hell, sinners are carried off by a mysterious dark air (aura nera) to serve their punishment. Dante, terrified by having entered “a place where every light is muted”, describes a hurricane that, despite its lack of substance, has the power to disrupt the physical world; it is a disembodied will and that is, precisely, its most devilish feature.

This Dantesque shadow is projected across Regina de Miguel’s piece. Taking up the imagery of a laboratory and subjecting it to unusual and impractical lighting, the artist creates a space for research that is incapable of satisfying the original needs: a possible laboratory of uncertainty, filled with inorganic presences and specters that are difficult to measure, where any experiment would lead us to intuit the dark areas of human knowledge and advance toward forms of future thought.

The installation finds its counterpart in a sound piece presented by three female voices, related to the superhuman triads from mythology like the Hesperides, the three Graces, or the three Fates. The recitation of this choral composition (with the collaboration of Lucrecia Dalt and Ania Nowak) evokes the origin of life, in the remote past, and foreshadows many of the chimeras, potentials and foundational myths of the future.

Regina de Miguel works as an artist harnessing a critical and cross-disciplinary agency in processes and conjunctions directed toward the production of hybrid objects and knowledge. Some of her projects deal with strategies for the formation of desire and its visualization as a psycho-social landscape. In that same vein, she analyzes the speculative and fictional borderline contained by scientific and cultural objects.

Some of her individual exhibitions include Ansible, Maisterravalbuena, Madrid, 2015; All knowledge is enveloped in darkness, Kunsthalle São Paulo, 2014; Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction, General Public, Berlin, 2011, and El Aire aún no respirado, [Unbreathed air] Laboratorio 987. MUSAC, Leon. 2009.

Exhibition view. Arts Santa Mònica
Exhibition view. Arts Santa Mònica
Exhibition view. Arts Santa Mònica
Exhibition view. Arts Santa Mònica
Aura Nera, 2016. Exhibition view. Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona
Aura Nera, 2016. Exhibition view. Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona
Exhibition view. Arts Santa Mònica