Exhibition Statement
“Open Skins / 13 years of performance art /
shows more than twenty-five performative works she created from 2006 to 2019, exploring (in most cases) the feminine, loss, and transformation. “Open Skins,” a multi-sited event takes place during the months of October and November 2021, features two exhibitions, The work spans from when she was a graduate student at Pratt Institute in New York and concludes during The Encuentro, organized by The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in Mexico City.
“Open Skins” marks the closing of one creative phase in order to give space to a new cycle of works. It is an exercise of unearthing the symbols that have been generated and embodied throughout these performative actions, to create a mesh or map of relations of actions, objects and characters. Over time, these symbols began to signify skins. Skins has become a language, a micro-cosmos of her psyche. Skins is more than the corporeal sense. Skins is fabric, clothing, costume, skins is action: covering and uncovering, dressing and undressing, blindfolding, wrapping, peeling, and piling. This unit of symbols represents a human reality in which we never can see the whole; as something opens, something else disappears. We cannot grasp a totality. In “Open Skins” each individual performance is a piece of the map, and when these pieces are open they can be experienced through their collective remnants.
This body of work is also a reflection of Polina’s creative process. Her work has been deeply personal, mostly performed in public spaces, and created with a structure to be completed and interpreted by the passerby. She uses ritualistic actions, through an interplay of personal states of vulnerability and power, which makes relating to the other essential. These works fall (with some overlaps) within any of these categories: Stage, Participatory, Actions and Impromptu, for the Camera or Collaborations.
“Open Skins” is a retrospective, an opportunity to look back. A pause, much like our current time, to gather what we have, what we have created, given and taken as we continue on, building, destroying, rebuilding, growing and tending to our skins.