en
/
es
Jessica Kairé

Art Basel 2024






    
    






Proyectos Ultravioleta is proud to present the Folding Monuments (Bitter Fruit) of Jessica Kairé (Guatemala City / New York) in the artist’s first solo presentation at Art Basel. Here, a collection of textile monuments, which can be manually lifted and lowered, sit alongside cut paper drawings. Together, the works weave a story of U.S. intervention in Guatemala and, by extension, the world. By tracing the public commemoration of presidents, businessmen, and corporations, Kairé teases out the ways that U.S. power and American business interests have contributed to conflict, corruption, and poverty in her home country. Her elegant material decisions—woven cotton fabric upcycled from used denim or cut paper—in their modest associations and streamlined constructions, also dismantle the historical representations of such power. That is, by taking the bronze sculptures off their marble pedestals and presenting them in soft cloth, or by imagining granite architecture into scissors cutting paper, she makes explicit a radical gesture that centers softness against violence, repair against forgetting, and accessibility against monumentality. The materiality of the work insists upon its democratic nature. Kairé’s Folding Monuments can be simply placed onto a shelf—shelved, as it were—to make space for alternative futures: indeed, they invite you to do exactly that.





Laura Augusta