Wynnie Mynerva PE

Begane Grond

My work transits and widens the limits of the flesh, the body and desire. I don’t paint mere fictions but bodily possibilities. My paintings are a vibrant extension of my body, an erotic and synthetic field of plastic exploration. My pieces are both pictorial and performative. The pigment on fabric and plastic operates on the same level as the incisions I choose to make on my body: both are technologies aimed at disrupting the normative truth of sex and gender.

I see my work as the echo of a furious collectivity that refuses to accept patriarchal fantasies and heterosexual paradises shaped by the standard. My early sculptural research on genital anatomies ('The Other Sex', 2018) was the beginning of an exploration of the political possibilities of the dildo to undo heterosexual contracts). My next project was a reckoning with institutionalised misogyny and male authority ('Sweet Castrator', 2020), painting a series of landscapes where stalkers and predators find themselves persecuted and besieged. Always charged with autobiographical components, my work gives rise to the urgency of confronting impunity as well as the structure of racial, sexual and class violence that define the contours of the different forms of patriarchal violence.

For my fifth solo 'Closing to Open' I presented a video of my surgical intervention together with a series of paintings on transparent acrylic build a scene of celebration, joy and exaltation that activates questions about the body and self-determination. I had to learn to read the medical discourse – the rhetoric of gender dysphoria, the protocols of sexual reassignment, etc. – to manage a change to which I aspired. My efforts are close to the struggles that various transgender communities have been waging, with whom I share spaces and intimacy. Aware of their privileges, and breaking the bubble that usually sees art as separate from life, my aim was to claim surgery not as a servant of the norm but as an agent of desire: as a tool to achieve a body with which I felt represented.

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Wynnie Mynerva’s (Lima, Peru, 1992) multidisciplinary work is informed by personal experiences of violence based on race, gender and sexuality. Their practice, which includes painting, performance, video and objects, seeks to question the corporeal tradition of human experience and, in particular, to break the hegemonic foundations that religious colonization, scientific-positivist enlightenment and extractivist modernity have caused to cultures of the Global South and to dissident sex-gender bodies.

For this project, Mynerva proposes a first-person experience and places blood at the center of their research: both because of the Christian colonial tradition of “blood purity”—because of the Inquisition—and its drifts in terms of privileges; and by subverting the concept of “infection”, in relation to hiv/aids, as a new stage of blood and its social condition, from which to build a new present.

Using speculative fiction, Mynerva creates new myths and legends, which they contrast with the veracity of the landscapes, architectures and traditions on large canvases. Their intention is to relate the vestiges of their past—Villa Salvador is a district mired in conflict on the outskirts of Lima where they were born and raised—with the condition of the infected body and their experiences. To do so, they irreverently subverts colonial religious symbols, such as the Cruz del Camino de los Andes on the canvases or the religious garments used in the inaugural performance.

– Agustín Pérez Rubio