Elena Damiani — Tellurian Surfaces and Core Fragments

Engaging with the notion of time and materiality, the Peruvian artist Elena Damiani presents her first solo exhibition in Germany. The title 'Tellurian Surfaces and Core Fragments' confronts our understanding of permanent earthly surfaces, readily visualised in phrases such as ‘solid as a rock’, with fragmentation as a process. Her new and recent stone sculptures and collage works embrace this constant flux by encompassing dynamic, decomposing, and transforming weathered bodies.

Damiani’s practice draws on geological records, cosmology as well as material sciences. The word tellurian derives from the Latin 'tellūs', earth, or relating to earth and soil. Commonly assumed as solid in terms of permanence, Damiani’s exhibition explores the movement of earth’s geological matter as a process, specifically processes of fragmentation occurring within rocks and other crystalline materials. Though this is often only visible throughout translated billions of years of geological time or deep time, the world is continuously disintegrating while whole. Attempting to comprehend the immeasurable duration of elemental geo-materials can unsettle and disorient our understanding of time. By way of assembling and reassembling geological materials and fragments such as travertine, marble, onyx and sand, the artist proposes an imagined narrative tracing the geological record of a whole without well-defined boundaries.

The large sculpture 'Testigos (after A. Aalto)' (2023) divides the main gallery space, drawing on architect and designer Alvar Aalto’s folding screen made from fine pinewood strips, which poses a stark contrast to the travertine bodies and copper hinges, that connect the columns of Damiani’s sculpture. Her flexible wall is comprised of stone fragments, each maintaining its own singularity while integrated to function as one. Both 'Testigos (after A. Aalto)' (2023) and 'Testigos IV' (2022) take shape in thin columns, reminiscent of core samples, used to trace past conditions and events in nature. Made from travertine, a limestone that shows the gradual geological conformations particularly well ensuing its colour and shape, the rods are cut to the vein from the same boulder and arranged sequentially. These 'assemblages', a reference to the writings of Guattari and Deleuze as well as Jane Bennett’s more recent Vibrant Matter, recomposes the original stratification pattern of the sedimentary stone. Picking up this deeper layer of geological materials, the series of collages 'Tellurian Signals N.1-4' (2023) combines black and white prints of found photographs of landslide scars from the 1959 Montana earthquake with enhanced photographs of geological specimens recording fractures below the Earth’s surface. The second room of the gallery holds 'Relieve II' (2023), a performative sculpture of two hand-carved onyx oloids. The artist solidified the stone traces across the sand by saturating the surface with water, a process which resembles the hardening of sand and other minerals by precipitation, resulting in the formation of an arid soil crust. The work is distinctive in its processual character recording a terrestrial footprint of physical effort in space. Placed alongside the 'Relieve II', 'Untitled M' (2023) pieces two found photographs of different transformation processes of two granite mountains in the Yosemite National Park into one. One of them considered one of the strongest rocks in California, the collaged peak shows a surface of granite slabs resembling layers of an onion.

The exhibition requests a closer examination of earth’s materiality as key to gain insight into the current climate change in order to rethink how social and political agency evolves and interacts with earth forces. ‘For the Terrestrial is bound to the earth and to land, but it is also a way of worlding, in that it aligns with no borders, transcends all identities.’ -Bruno Latour

Elena Damiani was born in 1979 in Lima, Peru, where she currently lives and works. Damiani has participated in multiple international biennales, including the Seoul Mediacity Biennial (2023), Cuenca Biennial (2018, 2016), Gwangju Biennale (2016), the Venice Biennale, Vienna Biennale and IV Poly/Graphic Triennial (all 2015). Solo exhibitions include Americas Society New York, USA (permanent installation, 2022), MAC, Lima (2022), Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2017), Museo Amparo, Puebla (2016), MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City (2015). Damiani has participated in group exhibitions at venues such as MoMA, New York, USA (2023), Museo de Arte Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico, and PIVO, São Paulo, Brazil (both 2022); CIAC The Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection, Mexico City, Mexico, and DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, USA (both 2020); San Jose Museum of Art, California, USA, and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy (both 2019); Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and Harn Museum of Art, Gainsville, Florida, USA (both 2018); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow and MOCAD Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (both 2015); BIM Bienal de la Imagen y Movimiento, Buenos Aires (2014), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, MAC Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Lima (both 2013); Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, Valencia (2009), MAMBA Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires and IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia (both 2007), and Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2006). She was awarded the Grants & Commissions Program, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO, Miami, USA (2016) and the commission for the David Rockefeller Atrium, Americas Society, New York (2014). Her work is represented in the collections of MoMA The Museum of Modern Art, MALI Museo de Arte de Lima, GNAM Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo Tamayo, Kadist Art Foundation, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Schoepflin Foundation and FOLA Fototeca Latinoamericana.