With works by Maria José Arjona

Runtime: 05.07. – 02.08.2025
Opening: 04.07.2025, 6:00 pm

The exhibition presents an ongoing multidisciplinary project that combines video, sound compositions, drawings, photographs, and a manuscript to explore the politics of memory, movement, and cohabitation. Drawing from performance, ecological thought, and archival theory, the project reframes the archive as a dynamic, elastic field, animated by choreographic attention rather than static preservation. The work does not document but listens; it does not fix, but orients.

The exhibited pieces bring together María José Arjona’s research of recent years on water, habitat, and sound, developed across diverse geographical and political contexts including various rivers like the Magdalena, Guaviare, Palomino, Amazonas, and Cauca rivers in Colombia, the Hudson and Miami rivers in the US, and the Spree river in Berlin. These investigations converge in a body of work that is both materially and conceptually fluid, reflecting the artist’s interest in the interdependencies between bodies, environments, and sonic ecologies.

A key element of the exhibition is a manuscript that will be presented for the first time in its completed form. This manuscript foregrounds the distinctive and so far, unaddressed role of text and writing within Arjona’s artistic practice. Like the other works on view, the manuscript is part of a larger process that remains open-ended. The entire body of work will be performatively activated and further developed later this year during the Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala, where it will continue to evolve as a living archive.

María José Arjona (*1973, Bogotá, Colombia) is a performance artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores time as a generative force in the construction of socio-affective structures. Arjona repositions the archive not as a repository of the past, but as a living interface for imagining collective and horizontal futures. With a background in contemporary dance and long-durational performance, she often integrates sound, drawing, movement, and experimental writing to produce choreographic environments that activate perception and memory through embodied attention. Arjona is currently a Fellow of the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Program (2024–2025).

Curated by Melanie Roumiguière

Exhibition Opening:
04.07.2025, 6:00 pm
Galerie Barbara Thumm, Markgrafenstraße 68, 10969 Berlin

Artist Talk
10.07.2025, 7:30 pm
daadgalerie, Oranienstraße 161, 10969 Berlin

Join us for an artist talk with María José Arjona who will be in conversation with Melanie Roumiguière. The discussion will center on a lesser-known aspect of Arjona’s practice: her work with text. Taking her most recent and unpublished piece, Recordings, as a point of departure. The publication will be displayed in the space allowing the audience to engage with the work.