Biennale of Sydney

donate

White Bay Power Station

Abrazar el sol (Embrace the Sun), 2023-2024
Peruvian cotton textile

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Courtesy the artist.

Courtesy the artist

Diario (Diary), 2022
video with sound, 6 minutes 28 seconds

Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Courtesy the artist and Ginsberg Galería, Lima.

Strung from corner to corner, like a cobweb or dust suspended in fragmented light, Cristina Flores Pescorán’s sculptures are somewhere between energy fields and disembodied nervous systems.

Following the thread that connects health and illness, Flores Pescorán began her own healing journey in adolescence when a skin cancer condition exposed the young artist to invasive examinations, biopsies, surgical interventions, and medical observation for almost two decades. Dedicating a lifetime to healing her illness and investigating alternatives to the aggression of Western medical interventions, documented on screen in the monologic Diario (Diary), Flores Pescorán imagines a cure not as treatment but as a dialogue between body and ancestry, rooted in the restorative processes of nature.

Made with Peruvian cotton thread dyed in purple corn (maíz morado), a Peruvian food that accompanied the artist during her treatments, Abrazar el sol is a reconciliation between woman and sun. Constructed predominantly in place, the sculpture exists as object, performance, and meditation all at once. Beneath the languid tendons of a body finally in reprieve, it is clear that healing has less to do with control than with hope.