(…) Woman is unfoldable. I am.
Adélia Prado
Liane Roditi’s strength is in the ramifications, movements, and transformations.
It’s the subtleties that reveal the tension between abrasion and permanence, continuity and
finitude.
In her work, traversed by symbolism, the artist inserts matters gathered
throughout her life, joined by the beauty found in everyday fragments. If the body is the
structural axis of her work, it’s in it that Liane finds the realm of experience, of constant
change, of different tiers. The passage of time and the imprints fixed in memory are
woven in a way that evokes not only resistance, but also imprisonment.
It’s in her creative exercise that the artist explores the most significant angles
for approaching her poetic view. She doesn’t hide the scaffolding, the before look, nor the
paths travelled. Reality entails the story of making, of getting it right, of the imprints that
are visible in the fabrics, sculptures, photographs, videos, objects, installations and all that
represent her observation field. Nothing is more important than understanding the
dualities. Nothing represents us more than understanding our bodies as nature’s extension.
We are the stones that stay, the fertile ground, we are the trees that are reborn on every
cycle. The body also exists in the remains, in the traces and is inscribed in the memory.
With braided hair and plant fiber, Liane evokes the manual work, the confinement and the
webs that women are connected by. This process includes lovingness and transformation,
but mostly the need to investigate themes such as erasure and the silence socially enforced
to women.
In Dobras e Desdobras, each piece establishes an overwhelming dialogue with
significant stories to the artist. Vertebrada, the 18-meters long veil embroidered with
stones, narrates the weight that the woman/bride will carry through her life. It’s about the
spine, central axis of the body that, symbolically, carries that load. It’s not noticed,
however, it’s all hidden, concealed in the fabrics of a mandatory and socially enforced
submission. The polyptych Ocultar Revelando explores the contrast with light and
shadow, while simultaneously examining the erasure and dissolution of women. In the
photographs, the images appear as a gesture of questioning and friction. “Time and
memory traverse this process”, says the artist. It’s impossible not to remember Diane
Arbus, North American photographer and writer, who says that “a picture is a secret about
a secret”. There will always be something hidden, preserved and even silenced in each
piece. Photography makes us reflect on the role of observer when constructing meaning
and its importance when elaborating a narrative.
In Campo de Forças, an installation composed of sculptures of body fragments
fixed straight to the wall, the spectator/observer is instigated to construct a narrative from
their own point of view. The meaning is kept suspended, nothing is definite and the
duality, recurring in Liane Roditi’s work, awakens the imagination. We enter, therefore, a
field of ambiguity, where personal perception determines the course of the elements. In or
out, hide or reveal, suck or expel?
Passing through intimacies and absences, Liane addresses in her work pertinent
issues in the female universe, questioning the patriarchy, using the body, the action and the
image as an identity question, social roles and oppression. Observing the movements, the
wear and tear and enduringness of the matter. Evaluating the weight that hinders the path.
Looking, within many tiers, the markings, the recorded experiences, the yellow tones of
the passage of time. Is the memory a trustworthy advisor? Is it possible to imagine a new
reality?
Dobras e Desdobras exhibits a road of challenges and choices, a dive in the
search of what voices and silences are saying, developing and unravelling things that time
and society insist on erasing. The overflowing narrative intensity in Liane Roditi’s work
makes a choreography that explores dualities within resistance and indulgence, strength
and tenderness.
Isabel Sanson Portella