London
Wynnie Mynerva’s practice originates in their own body. In a complex interrogation of gender, intimacy, stigma, transformation, and resistance, the Peruvian artist has turned Gathering’s gallery spaces into bodily spaces for “My Weaponised Body” (on view through November 9, 2024). Monumental unframed paintings on fabric are suspended from the walls of the ground floor and basement galleries, stretched out to a large extent, but with volumes of fabric tumbling downward and (sometimes) outward like fleshy folds. The imagery does not cover the fabric supports entirely; instead, huge swathes are left naked. These unpainted areas act like a skin of sorts, peeling away from the walls while partly containing the space and the viewer within forms and colors that speak of the body in pain, in sickness. This strategy resonates with Mynerva’s search for “a personal writing of HIV in my body,” that can “name where I am and where I am not, in the dimensions of mental and physical space.” Writhing figures, including an almost-mythical creature in skeletal form, rise from the voluptuous, painterly depths. Dark crimson clots of paint, like blood, give way to gestural sweeps of the same color, juxtaposed with areas of yellow that suggest some bodily discharge. In the midst of these physical possibilities, there is tension, suffering, relief, and desire. Working against collective trauma, Mynerva’s work always resists norms and speaks on its own terms.
In the center of both galleries, and penetrating the floor between them, stands an imagined skeleton for Mynerva’s painted skins. In its monstrosity, it reads as prehistoric and futuristic—thick, heavy, and replete with meaning—calling to mind the artist’s surgeries, undergone for the purposes of making art. For their 2021 exhibition “Closing to Open” at Madrid’s Ginsberg gallery, they sewed their vagina shut. Then, Mynerva had a single rib surgically removed for “The Original Riot” (2023) at the New Museum in New York. The grotesque bone-like sculpture in “My Weaponised Body” appears more animalistic than human, with massive spinal elements that seem to be fused into a single immobile whole. Still, the way it occupies space and pierces the floor suggests something of human life, both conscious and subconscious, hinting at the unpredictable results when one breaches the other.
Paul Preciado’s book Can the Monster Speak? (2021) asks readers to think politically, giving new power to formerly marginalized voices. This is what Mynerva’s work does, too. Placing themselves at the epicenter of their practice, the body as political territory is freed from its usual biopolitical contexts and enabled to express new and shifting subjectivities within an aesthetic context. Mynerva talks about their practice in relation to movie-making—the moment when the main actors take up their positions with lighting, photography, and setting, and everything comes together, just so. In Mynerva’s case, however, the theatrical nature of their work suggests something more immediate, more intense and deeply personal. This is not a movie, this is a stage set where Mynerva’s works function as props and actors. This is live theater at its best.
