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Artist Statement
Maru Rojas (1982, Mexico City) makes drawings, media art, installations and conceptual artworks. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, Rojas often creates work using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo transubstantiation.
Her drawings are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middle-class mentality in which recognition plays an important role. Her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her works focus on the inability of communication and the dysfunctions of language. By investigating language on a meta-level, she tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilised’ selves.
Maru Rojas currently lives and works in London.
Statement:
I am a Mexican artist, writer and facilitator based in London, and a MFA Art Writing graduate from Goldsmiths College.
In my writing and artistic practice I examine the political decisions we make everyday in order to construct subtly subversive actions and experiences. These actions can be humours and playful but still remain critical of the status quo. Within these small acts of resistance I challenge institutionalised ideas or concepts – be it within education, the built space or public space, human relationships and our relationship to animals & objects.
I use different devices and actions to create new situations, new ways of relating to others and to the world and new ways of deconstructing the world through language, mixing critical approaches with fictional narratives.