Son[i]a #435
Wynnie Mynerva
Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva (Lima, 1992) was born in the 1990s in Villa El Salvador, a poor suburb on the outskirts of Lima, where the relationship with art was non-existent. Even so, Wynnie found a space for questioning and resistance, first in painting and soon after in video performance, sculpture and body modification –a space in which to rewrite narratives, experiment with the body and identity, demand rights, and imagine possible futures.
A multidisciplinary artist, their large-scale paintings, mostly made in situ, overflow with bodies –or rather fragments of flesh, organs, limbs–, which endlessly move, twist, transition, and transform. Their practice takes many forms and is situated on the boundary between the private and the political, strongly influenced by the social context and lived experiences that have shaped their creative journey. Their personal concerns permeate the colour, form and media they work with. As such, after a relatively recent HIV diagnosis, their art exorcises stigma, fear and death. It is also through blood, and its terrifying power, that they continue to challenge taboos, using art as a chisel that can create cracks in the normative, giving rise to new forms of existence.
In this podcast, we talk with Wynnie Mynerva about painting and the body –about flesh, skin, and weight. We look back at her formative memories in Villa El Salvador, living on the fringes: we invoke friends, affects and support networks, and revisit her first home-studio and the parks where they used to sell copies of the great Western masters. We also discuss the role of medicine and body modifications in their work, and the outrage in response to bodies that are transformed in the name of self-determination, rather than to conform to conventional beauty standards.
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