Roberta Lima | Aesthetics of Risk

curated by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein

In the context of curated by_vienna 2012: kunst oder leben. ästhetik und biopolitik

Risk has always accompanied (artistic) production in aesthetic, conceptual, economic, and social ways. Yet what will become of risk, in its complementary role to artistic thought and action, when the entire society—as per Ulrich Beck—has become a risk society?

When life as a whole becomes the fabric of exploitation and, as such, must be compromised day after day—as a casualization not only of work, but also of the “bare life”?

Galerie Charim puts up for negotiation this intensification of “art and life” with an exhibition by artist Roberta Lima. Originally a trained architect working in the pop-culture and underground scenes, since 2006 Lima has been exploring, through live performances, the contingencies, impressions, and outcomes of variable performative settings of her body-self, both present and absent, in social space.

Roberta Lima’s subjective approach is developed through two elements: on the one hand, the phase of occupation and individual localization of existing space through her performance occurring there; on the other, the objects and artifacts engendered in the process, which are later arranged so as to extend the scene beyond the “live act” in mediatic and sculptural ways.

Aesthetics of Risk charts this work complex of recent years, inasmuch as the artist revives and lends presence to those “experienced objects” that were stipulating and defining the “old space.” The transformational potential of difference, as the counterpart of power inherent to the view, this installation is oscillating between aspects that are past/present, revoked/desired, large/small, prosaic/unusual, close/far, that relate to art/life.

Along the way, Lima traverses and analyzes the “physique of objects”—such as in her corporeal interventions, where she cuts and open bodies, lifts skin and layers, hiding them, disclosing them, similar to a pornographic act of exposure—and thus advances forward to “the poisonous heart of things” (Foucault).