Cristina Flores Pescorán

Born 1986 in Lima, Perú
Lives and works in Maastricht, Netherlands

White Bay Power Station

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

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

Courtesy the artist

Diario (Diary), 2022
video, 6:28 mins
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.

Cristina Flores Pescorán is a multi-disciplinary artist from Perú. Her work is a dialogue between her body, healing processes, medical experiences, family memories, and feminism. Reflecting on her own experience of sickness, treatment, and recovery, Flores Pescorán employs a wide range of mediums in conversation with pre-Hispanic weaving, and dyeing techniques using medicinal plants that are part of her daily diet. She incorporates hand-made gauzes inspired by the Chancay culture (a pre-Inca civilization developed between 1200AD and 1470AD), whose reticulated veils are believed to have had magical powers used for healing and protection. Through her practice Flores Pescorán reflects and challenges what we understand as illness, death, cure, nutrition, pleasure and magic in our contemporary society.

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.