María Magdalena Campos-Pons

With an artistic career spanning over four decades, María Magdalena Campos-Pons returns to Berlin with her second solo exhibition at Galerie Barbara Thumm, featuring two new paintings, video pieces, and an installation with porcelain vessels.

The exhibition offers insight into the construction and expression of the artist‘s concept of identity, interconnecting multiple religious, spiritual, and geographical factors. In her repertoire, Campos-Pons draws from her personal experience to narrate the process of identity construction, from her own exile moving from Cuba to the United States, as well as her ancestors’, who arrived to the island from Africa and China. Her oeuvre interweaves personal experiences that tackle universal and collective ones at the same time, addressing historical themes such as the African and Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean. Campos-Pons uses her art as a medium for storytelling, engaging all senses through her performances and installations, always guided by her conviction of art’s healing power.

As a result of the invitation to participate in the 2008 Guangzhou triennial, Campos-Pons began investigating her Chinese ancestry and including it in her art. She created the installation “My Mother Told Me I Am Chinese: China Porcelain” (2008) for the triennial, including forty porcelain vessels and an acrylic shelf overlaying a video; Campos-Pons appears in front of a mirror performing a sort of ritual to the rhythm of music composed by Neil Leonard, while wearing a Yoruba mask which she later removes to paint her face white and cover her head with a veil, like a porcelain doll, suggesting a resemblance between the figures yet revealing a multifaceted and different appearance. The vessels evoke the relationship between Chinese porcelain used in Santería rituals (an Afro-Cuban religion combining Yoruba and Catholic elements), echoing the syncretism and presence of those cultures in herself and in Cuba. For the second and next iterations of the installation, the artist made and hand-painted each vase during her residency at the Harvard Ceramics Program in 2008, depicting landscapes of Cuba, Chinese characters and symbols, as well as Yoruba deities like Ochún, Ogún, Changó, and Yemayá, among others.

Galerie Barbara Thumm

Markgrafenstrasse 68

D-10969 Berlin