Teresa Serrano

This exhibit displays her long time engagement with women’s issues and shows a clear perception of the challenges women face in contemporary society regardless of social class. Her cinematic video, Glass Ceiling (2008), could be considered as setting the tone: a woman tries to ascend the professional ladder but is forced back a few steps and starts over and over again. Serrano´s fascination with cinema goes back to her teenage years and her friendship with well-known filmmakers such as Emilio Fernández and the Gabaldón brothers. Yet, Buñuel was always her favorite, since he portrayed situations of poverty in Mexico which, in Serrano's opinion, have not much improved nor changed.

This exhibition includes 14 video projections, single-channel works and a group of photographs, some of which relate to the videos, while others are a separate body of work. This type of work presents challenges in terms of installation which are very well resolved here. For those who have followed Serrano´s career and especially her shift in the mid-90s from a more conventional art practice to electronic media, the show situates her work within the complex world of contemporary and cutting-edge visual culture. Her images and the stories they tell about women and their predicament in the macho society in which Serrano was born, raised and continues to live have their own identities.

Albur of Love—an unusual phrase from archaic Spanish with an array of meanings, from chance to lies – was curated by Margarita Aizpuru, a long-time proponent of feminism. Working closely with Serrano, a strong group of work was selected. Some is inspired by the aesthetics of television, such as the four-screen soap opera, Mia (l998-99), about sexual harassment in the office and to date one of the most widely exhibited of Serrano´s videos. The gender-based violence and aggression in Mexico occupy the content of many of the works and can easily be extrapolated to the situation in Spain, where the rate of domestic violence is one of the highest in Europe. The theme also appears in other works such as Ritual (2000) and La Piñata (2003), a grueling and expressively staged video-performance related to the young women who have gone missing and are presumed dead in Ciudad Juárez. The exhibition also includes some film-based works (most of them black and white), such as A Room of Her Own (2003) which begins with the image of a woman alone in her room and grows to express the fears and anxieties that wound women’s lives even when there is no blood.

Altogether, these narratives are tangibly emblematic of real life. Teresa Serrano has turned this gloomy reality into a source of inspiration for her work. The images created by Serrano seem to resonate with the words of Virginia Woolf, whom she admires: “What is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” (from The Waves). The exhibition will be at the CAAM through October, traveling to TEA (Tenerife) and Artrium (Victoria).