The vulcanic deserts of Gran Canaria and Lanzarote are the ever changing misanthropic enviroments of Sira-Zoé Schmid video performances exhibited here. The deserts of this planet are no stranger to the art world: a convenient metaphor for emptiness and desolation, it is the paradigmatic ‘nowhere’.
Deserts are real places, and they are also metaphors. Real deserts have an ecological extreme that makes them easy to symbolize many aspects of human life: an empty place, a place without many resources, a place where lives are fragile and in the balance.
But the metaphor is not just about the negative. Deserts are also extraordinary places of resilience, surprises, and astonishing beauty.
Great artists of the twentieth century such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, have chosen at different times in their lives to immerse themselves in the boundless territories of the American deserts.
Michael Heizer, leader of the Land Art movement in the sixties together with Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, created works of art and large-scale installations in the American deserts documented with photographs and films.
In 2017 Schmid began her video performance series „Desert Flower“ in the American Mojave desert. A woman — the artist — wearing a dark dress and a small blue parasol and turning her back to the viewer, takes a solitary path into the desert until she disappears on the horizon. With a clear and poetic visual language she explores the interaction of light and shadow on the shapes of the desert, revealing its austere beauty and reflecting as she slowly advances through the desert on the sense of bewilderment and fragility that this beauty causes.
On Artist in Residency in Lanzarote & Gran Canaria in 2022 Schmid continued her performance series Desert Flower by a second part.
Solo exhibition: Sira-Zoé Schmid – The Concurrent Presence Part III XII
Exhibition duration: October 12– November 30 2024
Venue: Muratcentoventidue Artecontemporanea, Via G. Murat 122/b, 70123 Bari, Italy
Sira-Zoé Schmid – www.sira-zoe-schmid.com, www.instagram.com/sirazoeschmid/
Sira-Zoé Schmid is an artist, with a focus on photography, text, installation and performance. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the class “Fine Art and Photography” under Matthias Herrmann and Martin Guttmann, and graduated in 2013. She is living and working in Vienna, and Salzburg. She has received many grants and residencies and has been shown in several international institutions and galleries.
