Artissima

A rising figure in the Colombian art scene, Leyla Cárdenas explores reality in a sculptural gesture that aims to spatialize and materialize time. She delves into the architectural ruins of cities as indices of social transformation, forgetfulness, and historic memory. Through installation and mixed media works, informed by history, architecture and archaeology, Leyla Cardenas un-builds to rebuild, giving a third dimension to a bi-dimensional work such as photography. In a act of resistance against oblivion, the artist ingeniously presents to the viewer the disappearance of historical buildings and the stratigraphy of eroded mountains in the outskirts of Bogota, through permutated images and actual layers of time and history that inevitably reshape the present. Working with archeologists at the Academy Jan van Eyck in Maastricht, she recently developed a new series of work around unweaving, parallel to the production of a video. The project for Artissima brings a dialogue between these last researches and methodologies.
Leyla Cardenas is part of the exhibition "An Emphasis on Resistance", a Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition, at Museo del Barrio, New York (October 30, 2019 - February 2, 2020)