Livia Marin

Livia Marin’s work has been characterized throughout by large-scale installations and the appropriation of mass-produced and mass-consumed objects. Her work was initially informed by the immediate social and political context of Chile in the 1990s that amounted to a transition from a profoundly overt disciplinary regime (given by seventeen years of dictatorship) to an economically disciplinary regime with a strongly developed neo-liberal economic agenda. She employs everyday objects to enquire into the nature of how we relate to material objects in an era dominated by standardization and global circulation. In this, the work seeks to offer a reflection on the relationship we develop with those often unseen objects that meet our daily needs. Central to the work is a trope of estrangement that works to reverse an excess of familiarity that commands the life of the everyday and the dictates of the marketplace. Marin has exhibited widely both in her native Chile and internationally.

In 2009 she began a project that looks into how we relate to ‘broken things’ whereby she introduces elements that are distinctive to ceramics, especially the element of decoration that gives the object its singular look and value. She transforms ready-made crockery and alters the placing and scale of their decorative patterns to present a series of indeterminate objects that appear paradoxically as broken yet complete.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS: