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January 9, 2020 – Review
The Drawing Triennial 2019, “Human Touch”
Nora Joung
Cecilia Jiménez Ojeda’s enigmatic installation Maria! Por Qué?! [Maria! Why?!] (2019) is an unexpected thrill in this otherwise unsurprising Drawing Triennial. A large china cabinet filled with kitsch figurines is positioned diagonally across a small room. Hidden behind it is the lid of a casket, strewn with withered roses. Every now and then, a nearby stack of neatly folded towels emits clanking noises, which sound like someone angrily washing dishes next door. The hinting at domestic conflict and connotations of death create a sense of unease, counterpointed by touches of absurdity, such as the engraved plaques featuring stage directions for a soap opera, which are mounted to the back of the cabinet. Displayed amongst these are a series of photorealistic drawings of a bundled leather belt, a broken mirror, a disassembled doll, and what appear to be migration papers issued to the artist as a young child. The tension is enhanced by the installation’s secretive quality, and its wavering between being a drama and a farce.
In the exhibition guide, curator Helga-Marie Nordby writes about the recent unearthing of an artefact from the Blombos Cave in South Africa: a 73,000-year-old flake of stone on which a cross-hatched …