KADIST San Francisco Hosts 'de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas [from the underwater mountains fire makes islands]'

KADIST San Francisco presents de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas [from the underwater mountains fire makes islands] by guest curator Yina Jiménez Suriel, October 13, 2023 – February 17, 2024. The exhibition explores the concept of freedom through sensory experiences, alternate and altered realities, and interspecies relationships between human and non-human. Featuring 12 local and International Artists and collectives, the exhibition unfolds over three rotations, each with overlapping and new artworks, asking the question: how does art affect our bodies and perception and contribute to and alter our future? Through constellations of artworks installed in constant movement, Dominican Republic-based guest curator Yina Jiménez Suriel investigates the idea of freedom inspired by the tools and knowledge from communities that have desired liberation from the Western imagination.

de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas brings together artworks as “aesthetic tools” that demonstrate the key concepts of transmutation and escape and how these processes can be achieved through repetition. Several works explore transmutation as a process and the human desire to establish interspecies relationships with other living beings. Hong Kong artist Angela Su illustrates this gradual alteration of living beings' morphology and perceptual capabilities through acts of kinship. In her drawings, Chimeric Antibodies 1 and Chimeric Antibodies 3 (both 2011), oceanic creatures, humans, and machines converge and provoke the appearance of different forms of life-transcending categories. Brazilian artist duo Juno B & Jonas Van explore the figure of the Boitatá serpent of the Guaraní communities living between the current nation-states of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, as the ancestor of trans and gender-disobedient bodies in their video Kebranto (2021), which calls forth the possibility of bodily and temporal transmutation. The encounter with Boitatá also evokes the idea of escape, moving away from what is deemed stable and the binary, hallmarks of Western thought, towards what Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik calls the vital force.

Transmutation and escape are activated through the strategy of repetition, as illustrated in the performance work, Variation & Improvisation for 'In Harmonia Progressio' (2017) by Indonesia-based artist Duto Hardono. Focusing on sound loops as a metaphor to examine the human condition, the performance uses the human voice to transform language with the sound of the improvised compositions filling the space as a raw process of action and reaction, requiring the performers to be physically and cerebrally attuned to each other, resembling and expanding the primordial forms of human communication. Oakland-based duo Lypka Cross's trio of sculptures, such as tombs and ignition (2022), consider repetition through ceramic forms that began as sketches of symbols or glyphs to create variations of three-dimensional objects in clay. The duo is part of a new generation of Bay Area artists leading a revival of contemporary ceramic arts, reconciling with the forces of digitization and alienation in a technology-driven landscape. KADIST San Francisco director, Jo-ey Tang reflects on the exhibition:

“Yina Jiménez Suriel is one of the most vital curatorial voices emerging out of the Caribbean today. She brings her cross-cultural and global sensibility to KADIST San Francisco and she has conceived an innovative exhibition that redefines and expands audience engagement, amplified through programming in the Bay Area and as far reaching as Manila, the Philippines. The exhibition is exemplary of KADIST's mission in supporting artists and curators through our signature residency program, infusing the San Francisco Bay Area art scene with International Artists making their U.S. or West Coast debut, and addressing pressing social and political issues and cultivating arts ecologies on a global scale.”

de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas considers the relationships between the process of emancipation, the perceptual system of the human species, the expansion of human subjectivities, and the creation of new imaginaries. To deepen the scholarly research, the exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Spanish and English publication (published by Sming Sming Books with the support of The Center for Latin American Studies, University of California, Berkeley). Released as three digital volumes which will launch alongside each artwork rotation, the publication will be available to download from KADIST.org and will culminate in a printed publication which will launch at the final rotation. The publication features commission writing by neurobiologist Andrea Gomez (Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley) and Brazilian artist, curator, and scholar Ariana Nuala (organizer at CARNI – Coletivo de Arte Negra e Indígena [Black and Indigenous Art Collective]) and translation of essays by Brazilian writer, journalist, philosopher, and Indigenous movement leader, Ailton Krenak; Brazilian psychoanalyst, arts and culture critic, and curator, Suely Rolnik; and a musical score by the late Filipino ethnomusicologist and composer José Maceda, and more.

The exhibition in San Francisco is the outcome of an ongoing research project la historia de las montañas (the history of the mountains) that Jiménez Suriel began in 2019 and follows its first iteration in partnership with Pivô, São Paulo, in 2021 and was supported by residencies at Pivô and KADIST San Francisco. An extension of de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas will take place at Delfina Foundation, London in January 2024.

KADIST San Francisco (3295 20th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110) is open to the public Wednesday–Saturday, 12-5 pm, and is free to visit.

Public Programs

Thursday, October 12, 2023, 6-8 pm during the opening reception

Duto Hardono, Variation & Improvisation for 'In Harmonia Progressio' (2017), performance

More programs to be announced. 

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