Roman Fine Art in East Hampton is pleased to present Deconstructing Borders: The Flux of Dissent, its first solo project with Elektra KB. The show will debut during an opening reception on Friday, January 27th, from 6 to 8 p.m., and remain on view through Sunday, February 19th.
Elektra KB, who was born in Odessa, Ukraine, is a Colombian artist living and working in Berlin and New York. KB’s body of work is of a performative nature in the thread of the post-colonial discourse and uses the platform of the personal mythology: The Theocratic Republic of Gaia, a Utopian-Dystopian world.
The exhibition will speak to issues of migration, mobility, transculturality, and a sense of place. The topics of this exhibition will be especially relevant in regards to the worldwide refugee and migrant crisis. This is a very real issue our world is currently facing. Over 35,000 refugees and migrants died in their attempt to reach or stay in Europe since 2000, with 2016 being the deadliest year by far.
Many of the works in the exhibition have come from KB’s year-long fellowship in Berlin. KB traveled to what she perceived as a mutant city, where east meets west. She has been inspired by her own inflicted feelings of sense-of-place and home of an Odessa born Latin-American living in New York. KB interviewed several women who left their countries for a variety of reasons. This exhibition directly reflects her experiences with these women and is a response to her research. Each work is inspired and/or performed based on an individual or collective story. KB’s primary mediums include textile, photography, and video.
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Cathara Insurgent by Elektra KB. (Courtesy Photo) |
Deconstructing Borders: The Flux of Dissent features six new GIFs highlighting KB’s fantastical world called The Theocratic Republic of Gaia (T.R.O.G). T.R.O.G plays with critical humor. The Papesse, the veiled women, the guerrilla fighter are represented here as well as pre-Hispanic imagery and the cross.
KB received a DAAD award to pursue a visual arts fellowship with Professor Hito Steyerl at Berlin University of the Arts. In 2016 she received her MFA from Hunter College. ARTnews has written about KB’s work and she was named an artist to watch by British art critic Zoe Pilger, in the Independent Newspaper in 2015.
Roman Fine Art is located at 66 Park Place in East Hampton. For more information, call 917-797-8931 or visit www.romanfineart.com.
