Highlights of the MOLAA Collection
TANIA CANDIANI
(Mexico, 1974)
Reverencia, 2019
HD Video
6:08 minutes.
Accession: 2023
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Tania Candiani’s highly collaborative and research-based practice draws material from diverse cultural and historical sources to create works that pay homage to tradition even while exploring new artistic terrain. Reverencia captures a choreographed performance, in which costumed performers reinterpret the Dance of the Quetzals, one of the few ceremonial dances that survived the evangelization of Mesoamerica and is still performed in the Nahua-Totonaca region today. Candiani collaborated with a regional artist to create the penancho headdresses worn by the performers. Candiani’s costumes strip away the vibrant colors of traditional penancho designs, leaving only black, white, and a small amount of red, which alludes to blood, the necessary life force present in all things. Candiani worked with a choreographer to isolate a specific element of the Dance of the Quetzals—the bow—which the performers execute in a series of precisely framed shots. The resulting video—soundtracked by an extremely slowed-down version of the traditional flute and drum music that accompanies the dance—attempts to capture the moments of abstraction that emerge when the deliberate movements of the performers align to produce a perfect geometry. Transposing the narrative, symbolic, and acoustic contents of traditional Mexican dances into a new abstract language, this piece responds to an interest in the conservation of cultural memory through the recuperation and reinterpretation of traditions, rituals, materials, and clothing.
Tania Candiani, Reverencia, 2019
BIOGRAPHY
Tania Candiani lives and works in Mexico City. She practices at the crossroads of different language systems, including phonic, graphic, linguistic, symbolic, and technological. Translation across distinct systems of representation is essential in the creation of her work. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Arts in 2011, a National System of Art Creators in Mexico Fellowship in 2012-2014 and 2017-2019, and an Artist Research Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution in 2018. Candiani represented Mexico in the 56th International Venice Biennial in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in museums, institutions, and independent spaces around the world and is part of important public and private collections, including the Museum of Latin American Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, among many others.
