Gasworks presents the first UK solo exhibition by Amsterdam-based artist Mercedes Azpilicueta. Her work brings together marginal historical figures, fictional characters and gendered mythologies from South America’s colonial past.
Fuelled by collaboration with dancers, writers, researchers and craftspeople, her installations often take the form of intricate set designs, theatrical props, soundtracks and scores for a live performance that doesn’t yet exist, and where the viewer is invited to take centre stage.
Calling herself a ‘dishonest researcher’, Azpilicueta navigates across multiple geographies, chronologies and fields of knowledge, ranging from literature and art history to popular music and street culture, in a loving pursuit of subversive and contested historical figures —queer, feminist, exiled and unheard voices from the past— who haunt her videos, sculptures and textiles.
The exhibition at Gasworks offers a speculative vision of Catalina de Erauso, a 17th-century nun from the Basque Country who travelled to the New World, where s/he lived under male identities and became a ruthless lieutenant in the Spanish colonial army. Azpilicueta’s show presents newly-commissioned Jacquard tapestries alongside a new body of sculptures, costumes and props.
