Provisional Spaces
Helena Kanaan

Provisional Spaces is the result of a month’s work by Brazilian artist Helena Kanaan. The installation developed in the Políglota Room of Fundación´ace was presented at the February 2017 ´aceNITE, titled, Unstable, as a corollary of an intense period of conceptual and technical research.

PROVISIONAL SPACES (by Alicia Candiani)

Accumulation, covering, discovery. Things that have no fixed form. The fold, the empty body, the fugacity, the deviations of the technique… Kanaan’s work takes both from Deleuze and Bataille, and looks at Kiki Smith and Rivane Neuenschwander simultaneously.

During her residency at ´ace, the artist wandered in a creative search with many entries and unequal outcomes. In the end, and paradoxically, the circle –shape that without beginning and end represents the universe, eternity, the whole, the incarnation of oneness– served as leitmotiv to discourse on what is not determined and finished and is configured during the passage.

Although it is not the theme of this installation, when we wander around it we can’t stop thinking about the islamic culture, the Mudéjar architecture, the desert tents and the veils that cover heads and faces of Muslim women. From Syrian heritage, the artist uses the repetition of simple elements interlaced or superimposed for her compositions. Sometimes they are printed, sometimes only insinuated in the memory of the form that pressed the paper, others escape the plane and take physical life. The detail organizes but does not prevail in the set. The reiteration of the circles that gave rise to these works acts as a metaphor for eternity and at the same time as a way to contradict it and raise its constant mutability.

In the series of frotagges, which insinuate organic forms (although they do not come from them), it does not imitate nature, which would be an act of impiety on the part of the artist. On the contrary, it is suggested, remembered, discovered… and there is no fear that this fact can lead to something else non-representational that at times becomes pure space. It is in these “deviations of technique” that Kanaan shifts the limits of print media, removes its specificity and expands it, discovers new deviations and with them builds a work –unclassifiable between the print media, the textile art, the drawing and the installation– in which the means to construct it do not respond to its own laws but to the philosophy that generates it.