Isaac Ernesto – “(No) Son (No) Existen”

Reception: March 17th, 2023

_VIGILGONZALES Cusco - Pampa del Castillo 455, Cusco

VIGIL GONZALES is pleased to present the body of work of artist Isaac Ernesto, whose axes gravitate around the concepts of corporeality, citizen ethics and the subjectivities created in the midst of a process of political activation from a critical perspective.

Corporeality can be a means of expression to communicate a clear message, but what happens when someone else appropriates it? This is the question that the artist asks himself when taking a critical perspective from a space of (non) enunciation as an artist and citizen.

Questions such as: when is a martyr born, who decides who is a martyr and who is not, what death becomes valid, how is a struggle legitimized, and what does citizen ethics consist of, are a transversal axis that invites the artist and the spectator to think about how political subjectivities are being constructed in a context where it is expected that a martyr arrives for the conformation of the collectivity. In this way, appropriating a body that is not one's own: which bodies are worthy and which are not? It is a question that is left open.

Through the reproduction of the same work, multiple times reference is made to a subjective production, where a discourse is repeated until it is deformed, loses its essence and finally becomes forgotten. While this may sound like a fatalistic perspective, it is also a way of showing a process of aestheticization of certain discourses, without a deep understanding of the problems they seek to discuss.

This exhibition is part of Isaac Ernesto's first institutional exhibition at the ICPNA in Lima, curated by Carlos Zevallos Trigoso, a researcher and visual anthropologist at the PUCP who focuses on photography as a technology of representation and the anthropology of contemporary art.