Yoxi Velázquez

(Cuba, 1988)

On her artwork

Yoxi is a transdisciplinary artist whose work finds her dismantling patterns, social scripts that prefix who she is, who she can be, exhibiting the ways in which those fittings work and undoing through practice their bonds. Her works can move from her most hidden inner planes, her anxieties and fears, to the tension of social delusions, that way in which collectivity implies compliance with regulations and masks.

Through her actions, sculptures, videos and performances, she figures herself as the embodiment of an unprecedented intimacy. In her performances she uses unpredictable objects that she engulfs, attaches to her body or juxtaposes to elaborate images that transgress the expected behaviours as a woman, an artist, a social subject. From an aesthetic that resorts to precise and suggestive visual elements, she subverts the forms of authority and the multiple roles that conditions from the most personal aspects of her femininity to her possible behaviours in the collective space.

Cloth toys, pets sculptures, turn naïve references of domestic life into subtle mechanisms for unravelling patterns of authority. They also discover a language that plays with the fantastic and hallucinatory capacity of art as an injection of the unforeseen to disrupt the frontiers that constrain reality. From this concern, her practice becomes self-referential and self-reflexive, as a gesture that questions the scope of creation expanding its transformative potential. Video is then presented as a language through which she locates herself as a temporal subject. Although in all her work, art emerges as a way of constructing unusual imaginaries and elaborating new representations.

Trajectory (summary)

Studies

2015. Graduate of the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Havana, Cuba.

Awards

2019. Post-it 6 ‘Third Prize’. Cuban Fund for Cultural Heritage

2009. First Prize at the Provincial Salon in Holguín

Group Exhibitions

2022. ‘Purely formal’. Juan Francisco Elso Gallery, Cuba Pavilion. Havana, Cuba.

2021. ‘State of Spirit’. Cuba Pavilion. 14th Havana Biennial. Cuba.

2020. Felices los normales. #ReencuentroParaAntonia. Galiano Gallery. Havana, Cuba.

2019. ‘Zero Point’. CASA8 Gallery. Collateral, XIII Havana Biennial. Cuba.

2018. ARCOmadrid'18

2018. Art Madrid 2018

2017. ‘Archive against stereotypes’. La Acacia Gallery, Havana, Cuba.

2012. ‘Generous city’ 4th Pragmática Pedagógica, 11th Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba.

2011. ‘Trust’. 4th Pragmática.

2010. ‘Plan Calle’. 4th Pedagogical Pragmatics. Havana, Cuba.

2010. ‘Banca Rota’. 4th Pragmática. Havana, Cuba.

2020 ‘Estereotomías’ Provincial Centre of Plastic Arts and Design. Luz y Oficios Gallery. Havana, Cuba.

2020 ‘Ausstellung JUNTOS-HAVANNA 500’. AutoArt Gallery, Berlin, Germany.

2019 ‘In Continuum’. Carmelo González Gallery. Havana, Cuba.

2019 ‘500×500’. Provincial Center of Plastic Arts and Design. Havana, Cuba.

2019 ‘Konvergenz’. Hassia Gruppe. Bad Vilbel, Germany.