PEANA is pleased to announce a solo presentation by Tomás Díaz Cedeño at Frieze London 2022.
Part of Frieze London’s themed section curated by Sandhini Poddar (Adjunct Curator at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi). Indra’s Net derived from ancient Buddhist and Hindu thought-forms, “Indra’s Net” refers to an ethics of being, where an individual atom holds within it the structure of reality. Imagine a vast bejewelled net: at every nexus there is a reflective orb that mirrors and refracts every other orb in its entirety. Every part is held within the whole in a system of dependent origination. All sentient life is interconnected and interdependent; shifts to one atom subtly alter the rest. The section will bring together artists whose practices are deeply informed by this prescient metaphor. In various media, we learn of ancestry, consciousness, land, language, and futurity as being bound to the earth, which serves as a perennial witness through the arc of time.
Mexico City-based artist, Tomás Díaz Cedeño’s practice in sculpture and installation explores the dynamic cycles and interconnections between the body, objecthood, our built environment and nature at large. Cedeño’s ontological probing of the artificial and the organic, through his interests in both the talismanic/ mystical as well as the scientific, allows for an equivocal and nuanced understanding of our contemporary relationships with these subjects.
At Frieze London, the artist states, “Make-a-wish fountains are part of popular culture and tourism. A cultural vestige of symbolizing offering or payment to the gods for the enormous privilege of finding drinking water.
In the future, drinking water used for entertainment or decoration will probably be seen as a characteristic waste of the brutality, ostentation and savagery of a previous time.” Butterflies, moth, and axolotls are characterised by transformation and metamorphosis; salvaged metal parts from wrecked cars and buildings in Mexico City transmogrify into cast reliefs, pointing to scarcity, labour and resourcefulness in contemporary urban landscapes.
