María José Arjona

Bogotá, Colombia, 1973

            For María José Arjona, the body is always at the center of the scene. Her performances, as surprising as they are moving, stem from the experience in her own body, and yet, they challenge the spectator's body to provoke an impact on their sensibility. Her work revolves around the search for the movement of matter in space, with a particular emphasis on the relationship with time and the duration of that interaction, exploring themes such as identity and ritual, and has been described as a "poetics of movement".

            Arjona's arrival in the world of visual arts did not occur by her own desire. As the academic Rubén Darío Yepes Muñoz narrates, an abrupt event changed the course of her career. While she was taking her first steps in the field of classical dance, the artist suffered an accident that caused serious damage to one of her knees. The recovery process lasted more than a year and unfolded without certainty of whether she would be able to dance again. During that convalescence, a friend gave her a book about the life of Frida Kahlo. In reflection of the Mexican artist, the visual arts allowed her to find a way to externalize the pain, and despite never having shown interest in this discipline, she managed to enter the competitive Arts Program at the Superior Academy of Arts in Bogotá (ASAB).

            The second turning point was crossing paths in her early days with María Teresa Hincapié and later with Marina Abramovich, who helped her open up her ways of approaching the artistic experience. Arjona is an artist who has developed a very personal thinking about long-duration performance, re-performance, scripting, documentation, and other issues related to the arts of the body. In her challenge to the unstable and the fleeting, in a commitment to making the process an experience of her own and with others, Arjona allows us to glimpse with some disturbance the possibilities and limits of the human body. In a certain sense, another way of dancing.