Project 35
Intermittent - Maíra das Neves
Curated by Tsering Frykman-Glen
October 27th - December 5th, opening reception Friday October 27th, 18:30 - 20:30h
In conjunction with Loop City Screen Barcelona
A body in work mode. It moves according to rotating calendars; bodily functions are set by pre-determined shifts and pauses. The accelerated rhythm of competitive production rates is imposed upon the worker, who must perform under an eternal feeling of jet-lag.
Intermittent is an alert signal, and it is also a type of labour contract. It is the rhythm of an artist who must juggle their art practice with another job. Intermittent is Maíra das Neves’ first solo show in Barcelona, where she will present her most recent artworks:
The video-essay Life Span (2023) was shot entirely with a sports camera attached to the artist’s chest. From this emotional angle, the images show us a person moving between spaces of leisure and work. While the narrator’s voice plays with terms and concepts of corporative language, we see transport mediums as well as transcendental mental states. Reflecting upon today’s work life, Life Span also looks back at historical proletarian production. Here, it appears as the debris found on local shores, and also the material the artist employs to perform the mechanical gesture of binary decisions.
A self-portrait photograph shows us the artist’s own passage of time. In Equine (1998), shown for the first time, Maíra appears young and wearing a horse’s bridle on her head, as if she is ready to offer her physical strength to the labour market. Thereby alluding to the kind of contract expected in the industrial era, whereby time and strength were exchanged for a wage.
Workdays (2022) is the title of two sets of 22 watercolours. Each set follows the pattern of a calendar of one month’s work. In this case, with alternate working weekends and varying free weekdays. These patterns dictate and regulate the workers’ lives. Each watercolour has a predominantly black surface with some small area of light, and at times some colour. As with the repetition of days, the paintings are similar but they are all different. They also suggest the impossibility to see ahead, to understand the overall machine we are part of. Each watercolour is mounted by the artist on a precarious paper frame, giving each of them some structure, though they are still fragile.
Thus, Intermittent offers us a subjective perspective from the artist’s personal experience as a cognitive worker in late capitalism and its data economy.
Maíra das Neves
With her artwork, Maíra das Neves (São Paulo, 1978) approaches different notions and politics of timespace, while she also trains bots and cleans timelines. Currently, she focuses on the perception and management of time within labour and on the modes of production of biocognitive capitalism. Seeing language as a battlefield, her art practice includes transcosmological translation, historical fictions, and narrative technologies. Her work comes to form in varied media such as watercolours, photo-paintings, installations, essays, and videos.