For the second iteration of our mini exhibitions series, part of the new cycle of Siembra at kurimanzutto, we are presenting Ad Minoliti and Zadie Xa. Both artists produced new bodies of work based on their shared interest in the way in which non binary bodies and other species organize, come together and interact; whether it is through kinship or matrilineal societies and structures, as exemplified in the work of Zadie Xa, or through the queering of geometry and abstraction, as proposed by Ad Minoliti in order to help us understand and experiment the visual world around us in a different way.

Zadie Xa combines sculpture, painting, light and sound to create immersive multi-media experiences. Drawing from a range of fields including ecology, science fiction and ancient religions, she explores how beings imagine and inhabit their worlds. This new body work, tells the story of animal kinship as a survival strategy to save an ailing planet, and furthers Xa’s ongoing engagement with the powerful complexities of interspecies communication, matriarchal social structures and ancestral homelands.The creatures featured in each of the works, speak to the damages caused by humankind’s reckless behavior, impacting the sea, air and land. They also invite us to recognize the interconnectedness of every lifeforms on Earth and to take healing actions, before it is too late.

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On the other hand, the work of Ad Minoliti uses geometry and color to build a non-binary speculative fiction that becomes the foundation for different bodies of work. Geometry is for Minoliti the best tool to represent and investigate into the possibility of a non-human heterotopia, an alternative universe, where gender theories can be applied onto the pictorial language, in order to help us understand and experiment the visual world around us in a different way. Taking this as a starting point, Minoliti’s practice addresses and integrates several ideas around modernism, fetish, education, architecture & design, queer feminism, science-fiction and disability studies, among other subjects.

This new series titled Fábulas (Mariposas y Flores) is based on Sara Kay, known in some countries as Holly Hobbie, a fictional character of a rustic, animal-loving, rag dress-wearing little girl in a giant bonnet, created in the sixties and popularized around the world in the seventies. The character makes its way into Argentina’s popular culture during the dictatorship and through a local publishing house (Editorial Atlántida), openly affiliated with the regimen, that used Sara Kay as a symbol of the female return to victorian values and domesticity, during a period in which women were becoming more and more socially involved, militant and politically active. In a context in which freedom of choice wasn't an option, Sara Kay was not only allowed, but encouraged and used as a indoctrination and oppression tool, in order to teach or reinforce heteronormative, binary and patriarchal roles and values. It is through their now characteristic use of geometry, that Minoliti appropriates Holly Hobbies’ soft and tender narrative, focusing on what is left in the picture once the human character is removed; butterflies and flowers.