Integrale ...

Meeting with Monica Mura; Text: Íñigo Rodríguez Román

To speak of Monica Mura (Cagliari, 1979) is to speak of one of the visual artists with the greatest projection of contemporary Spanish art today. Settled in Santiago de Compostela since 2002, her work has been chosen and exhibited by institutions such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela or the MIA Art Collection in Dubai, consolidating itself in the national and international circuit of the art world.

As a curator Monica embodies many of the maxims that I have always held dear in an artist. She and her work are courage, transgression, and versatility at the service of a constant search for new communicative situations. This makes her an ever-evolving creator whose works offer the public a frank and direct dialogue in a viscerally univocal way. An example of this is his piece The New Armor (2020) whose presence in the last edition of the ARCO Madrid Fair did not leave anyone indifferent.

Mura is holistic in substance and form, and yet she is always Monica Mura. It seems important to me to establish this premise, because throughout her career the artist has not stopped experimenting with her art, being able to maintain an enormous aesthetic and discursive coherence. His proposal is multidisciplinary, and she does not hesitate to generate back and forth paths between techniques and supports, in such a way that she has known how to travel through painting, sculpture, photography, video installation or performance, dislocating the boundaries of technique without complexes, to expressively enrich each and every one of the messages she have wanted to launch.

The self-referential is a constant in the Sardinian artist, who uses her image and the now contextual to shape an art with a great political and claiming charge. His discourse is constructed from feminism with works that denounce the ‘expanded violence’ assembled in the DNA of Western postmodern society, giving rise to reflection and a critical stance on issues such as the constant aggression to the identity freedom of the individual, the expansion and survival of heteropatriarchal memory (Your void is my absence, your memory is my presence, 2017), or the cruelty and consequences of the economic and religious wars that persist in full s. XXI. (THE WALL OF SOAP Do you wash your hands? 2019)

This solid conceptual framework is accompanied by a constant in Monica Mura's work, the enormous importance she always places on the process. It is something that becomes clear if we see how preponderant performance is within her career. In pieces such as This is no longer what it was (2021) (6) uncovers the process of creating a textile sculptural piece through a performative action, thus enriching the symbolic plane of the resulting work.

The Italian artist conveys the narrative of her projects through two discursive lines. A first that affects the recovery of feminist non-memory in all those areas where the role of women has been suppressed or forgotten. We see it in her latest performance Sonallas (CGAC, 2021) in which she emphasizes the need to overcome the models imposed by the heteropatriarchal tradition, granting women the social position that they should always have. And a second in which she plays with the dislocation of the socially accepted common imaginary, giving rise to new signifiers that move the viewer to question their own epistemic ground. It is something that we can see in such spectacular pieces as E Portrait (2015-2017 Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) (8) and Tú Yo Yo Tú (2018) in which she works with gender identity and the breakdown of the standard imaginary commonly established.

Identity is the theme that drives many of her artworks If in Tú Yo Yo Tú you reflect on gender identity, in Poder Ver Ver Poder (2018) you do it on digital identity and value of our footprint in that new meta-universe to which we find ourselves hopelessly addicted, the internet. Monica Mura is not afraid to incorporate new languages ​​into her pieces, being Antenna Girl (2021) a clear example of this. In Antenna Girl she experiments with video art, live music, and collaborative creation through social networks, illuminating a corrosive performance with which she denounces the alienation assumed by exposing ourselves to the unaffordable flow of stimuli with which the network of networks.

Monica Mura's creativity seems situated in an everlasting horizon of possibilities, in that place where the audacious and tenacious are rewarded by making them leading artists. And Monica Mura is a brilliant artist, an artist in black and gold. Integrale.



Instagram: monicamura.art