Berenice Olmedo

Realised with generous support from LEAP Trustee Constantin Schwaab.

Made for Hic et Nunc (2022) at Kunsthalle Basel, her largest exhibition to date and her first institutional show in Switzerland, Berenice Olmedo’s sculptures might initially evoke earthworms exploring plastic cocoons, lugubriously twitchy condom-encased penises, or even extra-terrestrial massage devices. Their origin does not readily reveal itself. In fact, the artist used a rehabilitation clinic’s archive of cast stumps from different human amputees, taking moulds from these forms to create her own second-generation replicas.

Each sculpture, made by the artist using the same materials commonly deployed in the production of prosthetics, is a conjunction of two different subjects’ body casts. At first glance, they offer an appearance of reproduced seriality, yet all are unique and show the variations of each individual amputation. The amputees’ names, featured as part of the works’ titles, hint at this assembly of singularities. The objects’ movements arise from small robotic mechanisms in each sculpture’s bottommost tip, draped in a silicone liner typically used to create a protective barrier between an amputated limb and its prosthesis. Some of the sheaths appear dirty or used, or have tears in their soft tissue. Such details insist on these ‘bodies’ as marked and imperfect but functional and distinct, and add to their oddly mesmerising allure.

To choose Hic et Nunc (Latin for ‘here and now’) as the title for these works, and for the exhibition as a whole, insists that for all the timelessness of Olmedo’s inquiry (the body is, after all, sculpture’s most enduring subject), there is an urgent need to rethink the definition of what is human in the present moment. The question of what counts as ‘normal’ (or its opposite, and who decides) has been the motor of the Mexican artist’s practice for many years now. And those marginalised by society – whether stray dogs or physically impaired humans – have been her polestars.

Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City. Her practice focuses on the use of discarded materials and debris, from carcasses of stray dogs to disused human prostheses.