Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.

Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

Imagine a new threshold opened by wounds on fire that never close and become a substitutive door for untold feelings and thoughts… Imagine vanishing memories that are kept under the cortex of our brain, but freed through its open holes like water does through the fingers of our hands…  Imagine a space in which time is frozen and one gets lost in its limbo of incertitudes, wandering around our inner ghosts now etched permanently on the retina of our eyes… Burning is a new place for an encounter, where secrets appear in a mist of light and resist oblivion chased by the thread of spiders… Burning invokes presences that materialize under healing rays, which act like unpredicted channels for those who now appear under its illuminated spell… Burning keeps under our control the fugitive shadows of time in a room in which the profound essences of Elena Narbutaitė and Martha Araújo take over our comfort zone with a new and overwhelming intensity…

After years of oblivion and recently regained for the international art scene with her precise, intense and amazing body of work created in the mid 80’s of the last century, Martha Araújo presents for the first time to a public audience her most recent project (specifically conceived in 2017 for this show). A group of performative pieces which do not break the chains with her past, going further ahead, exploring new fields that make evident her concerns about some of the issues that have been present in her past work, and which now the artist has developed into new interesting readings that one can perceive, after so many years of silence, as a coherent and enigmatic continuation with her past.

Martha Araùjo’s extreme sensitivity manifests her concern about how we can grasp time and how our past shapes also our present. Martha has built shamanistic structures like embryonic capsules which might interrupt the natural cycle of time; black nets which dance under the light of Elena Narbutaitė’s visionary work which with sharp precision create the perfect environment for her encounter with Martha.

Elena’s laser cuts the thin air unfolding a ray of light that reaches the solid wall of the space, to then transform it into an immaterial entrance that expands and melts, reinforced by the collision of their mutual energy. With its shaking presence this ray of tangible light generates a tension while reverberating in the black entities that await silently to be possessed. Elena Narbutaité’s immateriality enhances and strengthens the uneasy burden Martha’s work carries, this unconventional marriage brings to light a new experience not to be explained but felt.

The communion between both artists is not just uncovered by the atmosphere they both create with the friction of their works, at the show there will be also some images taken by Elena Narbutaitė with Martha’s work, a sort of symbiotic experience that proves a similar sensibility in these two very different artists from distant generations and geographical contexts. Both foresee through the skin of our bodies trespassing (as if they had x rays in their eyes and minds) our most deepest secrets and thoughts.