Born in Matanzas province, Cuba, the renowned interdisciplinary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons works with performance, painting, photography, video, music, and sculpture. Campos-Pons explores themes of identity, race, gender, diaspora, and spirituality in her work, impulsed by her transcultural Nigerian, Chinese, and Spanish heritage.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, My Mother Told Me I Am Chinese: China Porcelain (Detail), 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Thumm.
With an artistic career spanning over four decades, María Magdalena Campos-Pons returns to Berlin with a show featuring two new paintings, video pieces, and an installation with porcelain vases. The exhibition offers insight into the construction and expression of the artist’s concept of identity, interconnecting multiple religious, spiritual, and geographical factors. In her repertoire, Campos-Pons draws from her personal experience to narrate the process of identity construction, from her own exile moving from Cuba to the United States, as well as her ancestors’, who arrived to the island from Africa and China. Her oeuvre interweaves personal experiences that tackle universal and collective ones at the same time, addressing historical themes such as the African and Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean.
As a result of the invitation to participate in the 2008 Guangzhou triennial, Campos-Pons began investigating her Chinese ancestry and including it in her art. She created the installation “My Mother Told Me I Am Chinese: China Porcelain” (2008) for the triennial, including forty porcelain vessels and an acrylic shelf overlaying a video; Campos-Pons appears in front of a mirror performing a sort of ritual to the rhythm of music composed by Neil Leonard, while wearing a Yoruba mask which she later removes to paint her face white and cover her head with a veil, like a porcelain doll, suggesting a resemblance between the figures yet revealing a multifaceted and different appearance. The vessels evoke the relationship between Chinese porcelain used in Santería rituals (an Afro-Cuban religion combining Yoruba and Catholic elements), echoing the syncretism and presence of those cultures in herself and in Cuba. For the second and next iterations of the installation, the artist made and hand-painted each vase during her residency at the Harvard Ceramics Program in 2008, depicting landscapes of Cuba, Chinese characters and symbols, as well as Yoruba deities like Ochún, Ogún, Changó, and Yemayá, among others.
The exhibition offers a glimpse into some of the works of this multifaceted artist, a selection of pieces made years apart that continue to respond to Campos-Pons’ ever-lasting and ever-changing quest to explore her identity. Her works lead us to question absolute truths about who we are and how we define ourselves. More importantly, the exhibition extends an invitation to consider identity as a process that is built every day, a matter of the present rather than a static one anchored in the past.
The exhibition will be on view from the 27th of April until the 1st of July, 2024. For more information, please visit Galerie Barbara Thumm.
