MARIA LOBODA
LA FÊTE, LA MUSIQUE, LA NOCE
After participating in the 2015 group exhibition Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Maria Loboda accepted the IAC’s invitation to produce a solo exhibition, the largest she has had in France.
Inspired by history, archaeology, geology, anthropology, and linguistics, Maria Loboda bases her work on the interpretation and re-appropriation of the symbols and rituals of human societies. The artist’s transhistorical reading of myths, of arcane, occult, and alchemical sciences, brings forth iconic forms that interrogate the power or obsolescence of the artefacts invented by humanity in the face of surpassing forces.
Far from attempting chronology or classification, Maria Loboda creates an aesthetic, almost a symbolism, whose reach transcends time and space, unfolding elliptical and enigmatic narratives to perturb the visitor. Her coded installations awaken suspicion through a subtle encrypting whose key could be language. These apparently simple forms take on a disturbing dimension and deploy a cyclical energy within the exhibition space, persisting in the beauty of the code and its infinite possibilities of substitution.
By infiltrating systems of belief and knowledge through their own logic, Maria Loboda activates the subversive potential of these intellectual structures. Her ambivalent appropriations play upon the slippage of meaning to liberate the antagonistic force latent in every object. The fallibility of meaning exposed in her creations unsettles everything we believed sure, comfortable, reliable. Maria Loboda’s oeuvre seizes upon that force of pure fascination, arousing our desire to know and to foretell.