Fragmentum
This research explores the concept of the "fragment" as a guiding thread to analyze and investigate various topics in the realm of creative imagination. Through a personal testimony, the study examines how the fragment reflects identity in constant movement, becoming a means to understand family roots, changes, transformations, travels, migrations, and cultures. In artistic practice, the work *Fragments* reveals the composition and meaning of these pieces, using cardboard as the central material. It analyzes how cardboard is reused and transformed into multiple layers of information and history. This analysis seeks to understand these concepts from a personal and contemporary perspective, exploring the fragment, abstraction, migration, syncretism, and hybrid cultures. The fragment is presented as an initiative to observe and narrate in a different way, opposed to totality, allowing for reflection and understanding. Additionally, the fragment becomes a revealing metaphor in the image, imagination, and memory, leading us to question how we perceive.
The diversity of cultural, geographical, and ancestral fragments that make up our identity is infinite. Yiriane Kahn's work arises from the urgent need to explore our roots and narrate our history. Thus, immersed in this continuous flow of transformations that intertwine, new fragments take shape.
Through mixed media techniques, Kahn invites us into a fascinating play of textures and forms where a varied range of materials, such as pure pigment paints, cardboard, cement, walnut ink, imitation gold leaf, and Chinese ink, among others, come together to create spaces that evoke her Dominican roots, as well as her German, French, and Argentine heritage, alongside her present Ibero-American identity, in a continuous dance between Lima and Madrid.
These spaces create a new time amalgamated with tradition and re-signified present. Each work is part of Yiriane's story and is, in turn, a fragment, a frozen, static moment of creation. -MJK (Buenos Aires, October 2023)
Concept
The concept of the 'fragment' that runs through my artistic work becomes a guiding thread that helps us understand our identity in constant evolution and our cultural roots in a diverse and ever-changing world.
We are continually faced with questions like 'What are your roots?', 'Where are you from?', and 'Where does your family come from?'. The diversity of fragments that make up our identity, whether cultural, geographical, or ancestral, can be truly infinite. However, we feel an innate need to know and understand our roots, to narrate our history, and to understand how it transforms over time as new fragments are added to our identity narrative.
The concept of cultural syncretism explains this constantly evolving mix of different cultures, thoughts, and religions. We could say that we live in a time of 'syncretic fragments,' where different influences and perspectives intertwine and fuse, creating a complex web of shared identities and experiences.
If we look closely at cultural syncretism, we can perceive a hybridization of customs and roots in a specific space and time, generating a sense of 'fragmentary identity.' Our roots are inherently hybrid and multiple, and when they interrelate, they create new identities and cultures in constant evolution.
Thus, the concept of the 'fragment' in my art not only reflects the richness and complexity of our identity but also invites us to explore how our roots and cultural experiences intertwine and transform, generating a deeper and more nuanced understanding of who we are in an increasingly interconnected and diverse world.
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