Valentina Díaz

Vernacular presents the solo exhibition, The Intermittent Movement of Speech Acts, featuring the site-specific work of Mexico-based Argentinian artist, Valentina Díaz. 

Díaz’s practice outlines a mechanised language that conjures abstract geometry, body, and rhythm. With a 1960's knitting machine inherited from her grandmother, she employs the obsolete manual technology to encode mental states. Her work focuses on the production of woven fabric and characters that serve as the impetus to performances in which the relationship between human and machine, emotional time and the time of a metronome, frequently appear in friction. In her pieces, the structural knitting pattern forms a graphic score that guides the movement of each of the characters while simultaneously exploring the structures associated with a range of processes of diverse complexity. Continuous translation operations, fictional scenes, movements of variable repetition, and elements reinforcing the mechanisms of control within the body, make up this unique structural system in order to understand and experience emotional, physical and mental states. Together, the pieces and performance work as a ritual, one that begins with the artist, from within her thoughts, her body, her knitted time, and is carried out by another body that becomes the next gear of the system. 

Derived from the existing piece /A Å Æ )A(, the new work is conducted in a theatrical setting to foreground the metaphor of ritual. In addition to the video and drawings, The Intermittent Movement of Speech Acts stages a piece of live installation activated by performances. 

Opening on 11 February with the performance at 6pm, 7pm. 

The exhibition continues to open with the performance every Friday and Saturday at the same schedule through 12 March. The following dates are:

25/02  26/02  04/03  05/03  11/03  12/03

The exhibition is on view by appointment during the non-performance dates.

— Vernacular Institute