BLANCO
Male Chahin
Chile, resident 2022
Male Chahín studied visual arts in Chile and completed a master's degree in artistic production at the University of Barcelona.
After several years away from art, it was after going through several health issues and surgeries that she resumed her artistic work in 2022, through ceramics. She is currently carrying out a visual investigation on nature and its polarities, under a look that integrates extremes historically rejected by Western culture.
His search is based on her own experience and explores pain, transformations and death, from a perspective that allows reflection on the fissures of what dissociates us from the body and space we travel, inseparably encompassing the natural environment and the spiritual dimension. .
In practice, this is reflected in a sustainable material production, where her work is built from what the place of realization allows, producing and collecting from nature and the local context.
Her work has been exhibited in Chile, Australia, Spain, Mexico and Argentina and is part of the Unicaja collection in Malaga.
Studying the pain of beauty
During the residency at Ruido Blanco, Malena worked with photography and ceramics as supports to show beauty in the imperfect. For this, she presented two series of works: Nude Series and Beauty Studies Series.
Malena investigates how in the West the gaze was educated to perceive the beautiful/good with white, elevated, neat, clean and painless as desirable and positive notions and categories. There is no acceptance of all bodies, attempts are made to hide pain or what is considered negative such as blood, death, old age, among other human characteristics.
In her research, she found that the only space where we assume and accept polarity is in nature, where putrefied is compost and where death is necessary for life. She found details in the Misiones rainforest that referred her to something that was not accepted by Western culture and she recorded it photographically. In the open study, the photos were accompanied by titles such as stretch marks, scar, among others. With this action, Malena discusses how culture educates the gaze and establishes demanding social categories.
In the living room, her photographs were supported by transparent glass that revealed the triple border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay at the distance, but as evening fell, the glass reflected the works of her companions. In particular, the video made by Mads, which narrates a myth of origin of the area. The idea of the cyclical is not accidental: it was present in this game of fiction/reality built by the location of the works in space.
On the other hand, with her series Desnudos de ella, Malena questions how nature forced her to penetrate it conceptually and materially. The series, made up of three living ñaú clay sculptures, refer to parts of the human body and fragments of nature at the same time. With a game of active participation, Malena invited the viewer to touch the sculptures and find possible organic forms.
These two series presented in the exhibition are the result of research carried out by Chahin in the territory. The artist, she invited us to talk about what no one talks about, and to understand that healing can be found in the word, in the action of saying and identifying pain.
Text: Irene Gelfman
