Veronica Ruth Frias

Verónica Ruth Frías - I am your sister

Técnica: Digital photography

Biografía del Artista: Verónica Ruth Frías (Spain, 1978) is a Spanish feminist contemporary artist based in Málaga. Her works are created through performances in which the body is subject to the work. She graduated in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Santa Isabel de Hungría in Seville. Appropriation, costume and tattoos are some of the tools she uses to place her body at the service of art and transform the personal into artistic practices. Sarcasm, irony and humour are fundamental for the artist, although she deals with very serious issues such as the construction of the feminine, motherhood, violence against women or discrimination against women in the history of art. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including Super M at the ECCO in Cádiz, Extra(ordinary) Narrations at the ABA Art Gallery in Palma de Mallorca and I love my mother a lot at the Tula Prins Gallery in Córdoba. She has received grants and awards such as the INICIARTE Production Grant from the Junta de Andalucía, the Rafael Botí Grant from the Rafael Botí Provincial Foundation for Plastic Arts in Córdoba, the DESENCAJA Prize for Plastic Arts in Málaga and the 10th Pepe Espaliú Plastic Arts Contest, also in Córdoba.

The Guests I AM A WOMAN arises from one of the critical principles of current feminism, the reversal of gender roles as a tool for analysis and a channel for female empowerment. Long before Verónica Ruth Frías brought this statement to the category of a work of art, the artist Glenn Ligon did the same from his condition as a black and homosexual man based on the words I AM A MAN, a simple proclamation that nevertheless had a broad meaning as it came from the demands of some African-American strikers in Memphis (1968). Glenn Ligon brought the banner to the canvas with no further stylistic issues than the typography of the original, black on white. Verónica traces the principles of the artistic corpus I AM A WOMAN as a direct consequence of those assumptions, this time (half a century later) to assert that it is necessary to speak from the condition of women. In all areas of life, of course, but particularly in the art world, where women have difficulty accessing quotas of power in management, as well as in curatorial selections of museums and exhibitions, or in the rigorous filter of specialized books and art reviews. It is precisely the written word that has ignored the female gender, fostering male pseudonyms or simply invisibility and oblivion, one of the most effective barriers to which female creators of any era have been and continue to be subjected. In 2018, we read with stupefaction the octogenarian Georg Baselitz boasting about the inferiority of the female sex in relation to artistic creation, justifying the obvious inequalities between the collection of artists of one gender and the other. The market is right. Women simply do not pass the test. We find it difficult to accept that in the present time this position of an artist elevated by success is used to validate a syllogism of sinister totalitarian roots. I AM A WOMAN works as a choral project in which the artist involves women from different sociocultural environments, through a range of complementary actions that are still in development and gradual expansion, based on the premise of the virality inherent to all forms of activism today. By inviting women to be portrayed with these new slogans of emancipation and visibility, or to be tattooed with them, she emphasizes what has become one of the main keys to the current feminist movement: sisterhood. They made the message their own and transcended the initial performative vocation to constitute a kind of non-static exhibition with their own bodies. The guests Russian Museum of Malaga Project curated by Pedro Alarcón and Angeles Ramos Santiago Watch video at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uHZHUbRbT0