Textile Woman, Performance

Textile Woman. Yohanna M. Roa

By Karen Cordero Reiman, curator

2022

The exhibition Textile Woman by Yohanna M. Roa synthesizes and at the same time expands the transdisciplinary artistic practice of this Colombian-American creator through an immersive installation that she activates through performance. It incorporates individual pieces made at different times during her career, as well as new works. The exhibition has an autobiographical basis, since the use of sewing, embroidery, and crochet in Roa’s artwork refers to her upbringing in a family where her grandfather was a tailor and her grandmother a seamstress and clothing designer. At the same time, Roa’s work uses the intervention and transformation of canonical images from the history of art with textile media, in order to criticize the patriarchal and colonial structures that establish hierarchies of the gaze and of material culture that they impose on our bodies and identities. In this way, Roa recuperates and revalues—in her own words– “the ability of many women to construct environments and transform public interactions from a private standpoint”, through works and actions that transgress the imaginary borders that our cultures and our consciences establish between historical moments, geographical spaces, gender identities, and definitions of art. In this way, she creates a context characterized by freedom and discovery, that is both a personal manifesto and a proposal for the restructuring of power relations that are imposed on a social level.

Photos: Antono Juárez C.