Exhibition "Games of Contamination" by Nazareth Pacheco

"Nazareth Pacheco: Games of Contamination"This exhibition brings together works created by the artist since the late 1980s, tracing her production and research over four decades, and also includes two works in the outdoor area made specifically for this exhibition."

In critical reviews of the artist's work, frequent mention is made of the early influence of post-minimalism, serialization as an operational procedure, and an interest in experimenting with materials and confronting their properties and uses. Equally noteworthy is the way her work connects to her biography, to her investigation of her own body and the feminine, from its intimate to its political dimension.

His work is also frequently associated with contrasting and reflective relationships between beauty and violence, seduction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, protection and imprisonment, control and vulnerability, intimacy and exposure, fragility and resistance.

For Nazareth Pacheco, these binomials do not operate as opposites. They highlight the simultaneous and inseparable nature of their two poles, revealing the tension and inversions that keep the game in motion and the player-body in the running. Like in Ping-Pong, attention is captured by the dynamics of back-and-forth, which here is established between artist, matter, subject, space, and audience. In interaction, they make their bets, establish their rules, and, every now and then, transgress them.

In this sense, for the artist, play functions as a critical procedure: an operation capable of converting culturally stabilized signs into ambiguous and disturbing experiences, revealing the subtle violences inscribed in the devices of normalization and capture of the body and desire.

What becomes clear, with the game already underway, is that making the body a woman is perhaps the riskiest move: the biggest gamble. In a territory marked by intimacy, this body, fragmented and always in formation, is constantly traversed by mechanisms of normalization, capture, and resistance. Around the impenetrable Room, what previously seemed restricted to private space reminds us that power games contaminate and proliferate in the social and collective sphere.

These tensions are also visible in the materials the artist uses and in the way she subverts their usual applications: from rubber, bronze, and brass to wax, acrylic, beads, needles, blades, and other sharp, surgical objects, as well as blood itself. Their seductive and shimmering surfaces present the viewer with an inverted and unstable image of themselves and their surroundings. Materials, bodies, senses, and positions mutually transform each other throughout the performance. Between partners and adversaries, attraction and confrontation, each approach reveals that the experience with the work is always also an experience of contamination.

Amanda Tavares, curator