Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino: Peso

At Kunstverein Kevin Space, in their first solo exhibition in Austria, Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino presents a series of new works and unfolds a succession of interlinked trajectories centered on a complex operation of artistic labor. Even when—or mostly because—they choose abstraction as a somewhat of a refusal to figurative representation, the artist ponders and traces the theoretical, biographical, and historical research that informs their practice in addition to the intricate, fluctuating obscure characteristics, and productions of value in contemporary art that mirrors the institutionalization of contemporary society in relation to the colonial transatlantic project.

A score piece signed as Peso (the Portuguese word for weight, from which the exhibition borrows its title) reads “the artist’s body weight in municipal water” and commands an action that takes up most of the tangible space in the show. In this work, metal canisters organized in multiples of four and eight compose quasi-cubic units that hold the specified material with particular attention to its local, regulated source. Adopting the form of a grid, its celebration of calculation, surface, and abstraction is juxtaposed with the particularity and heftiness of a characteristic of the artist’s body that is at once quantifiable and cannot be captured fully. In a way, Peso (2024) speaks to navigations between visibility and opacity, facing the increasing demands for consumable identity and the dangers and reductions that come with it–to see art (as well as bodies and the world per se) through pre-established concepts, measuring it against and substitute it with what we already know. At the same time, its geometrical features may give enough space for other considerations, including its semblance to the canisters carried by the artist’s parents in their childhood with water collected from a river to supply the activities of their homes at the time.

Peso, coincidentally the currency name in various former colonies of the Spanish empire, is also a common term used to refer to money in hip-hop culture. With the exhibition, Celestino’s explorations are located not merely in the complex economic and social inscriptions and transactions of power that art is embedded in but also in the latter’s determinations in the site and the act of reading artistic work. In developing the exhibition in close collaboration with their parents, the artist challenges a capacity to stretch their own agency in the material choices here.

By painting the ceiling of the exhibition space with a color chosen by their mother and broadcasting the only licensed radio station of their hometown, Buritizeiro, in Brazil, they emphasize language as a critical element in their practice and announce the susceptibility of employing the instrumentality of interpretation.

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino: Peso can be visited until November 2.

Kunstverein Kevin Space
Volkertplatz 14/3-4
AT – 1020 Vienna

www.kevinspace.org