Iván Sikic: Body at Work: Solo exhibition by Peruvian Brooklyn based artist Iván Sikic

On November 1st, 2020, as part of Green-Wood Cemetery's Day of the Dead celebrations, Iván Sikic spent four hours cleaning and tending to the graves of immigrants from the Global South who were buried in Green-Wood Cemetery's Public Lot 14964 during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

After cleaning and caring for each grave, the artist said the names of the deceased out loud, as Tariq Allen, a Brooklyn based trumpet player, performed jazz funeral tunes to accompany the ritual.

Through 'Conscious Oblivion', Sikic aimed to pay tribute to the life, labor, and sacrifices of generations of immigrant communities who now rest at Green-Wood.

BREACH is a durational performance that seeks to question society’s impact on the natural world. Digging non stop for 3 hours, Iván Sikic digs a gap on an artificial sand dune that has been erected to protect the coast where it is situated from the Pacific Ocean. Through this action, the artist aims to re-establish the natural coastal landscape, by creating an opening that breaks the dune and gives the viewer a glimpse to the other side of the artificial sand wall.

At the end of the dig, an excavator enters the work and covers the hand dug gap made by the artist dumping a single bucketload of sand, encouraging a dialogue about the impact of industrialization and capitalism on humanity and the natural world.

After the corporate and financial centres of Miami started moving away from Downtown Miami and towards emerging financial centers in the city like Coral Gables & Brickell towards the end of the 1990’s, the heart of the city began to slowly shut down, almost to the point of oblivion.

As a consequence, what used to be streets filled with shops and businesses of all sizes, have now turned into a tropical ghost town of sorts, where buildings remain empty, and have become prey to gentrification, after the vast majority of the district was acquired by a real estate group willing to wait out this ‘slow period’, hoping to reap the rewards of eventually high rents, brought in by a younger generation of professionals.

Within this context, Iván Sikic’s series TOPPLED, photographed between February & March 2021, aims to capture the facades of those once bustling shops, but that are now hidden behind gates that were once closed never to be opened up again, and left in a state of decay that, as with TOPPLE (Sikic, 2020), the viewer is once again taken to question what would be in store in an apocalyptic society where the only traces of humanity are those of the places we used to visit for the sake of transacting.

From 6am on Thursday 20th February to 6am Sunday 23rd of February 2014, Sikic, in collaboration with artist Kai Bradley, dug out a trench on the north side of the Testing Grounds site, non-stop for 72 hours. They worked alternating 6 hour shifts with 4 hour breaks in between each shift to rest and eat.

All the dug out dirt was piled into a single mound next to the artists’ living quarters. The dirt mound was sprayed bright pink every 4 hours on the hour. After each spray coat, 5 items were picked out of the mound. These pink covered items were then bagged, sealed, time & dated, before being put on sale. The value of each item was determined by the minimum wage of Australian Journalists ($21.43 per hour). The first five items were valued at $85.72 each, the last five at $3,085.92 each.

At 6am on the third day both artists left the site and took public transport back to their individual homes.

This work is a response to mainstream media & mass consumerism. It’s the artist’s view that all mainstream media & mass consumerism items are made out of useless & invaluable raw material that, once glossed over, gain an arbitrary value that allows for their consumption.

In Iván Sikic’s Trashed series, the artist intervenes in public spaces attempting to highlight the invisibility of human-produced garbage and illustrate society’s disregard for the natural environment.