Coral Pereda Serras

Statement

Spain has historically been pulled by opposing cultural forces. On the one hand, my country tries to live up to the standards set out by the European Union. On the other, Spaniards closely relate to the affection of interpersonal relationships of Latin Americans and other Mediterranean cultures, while trying to understand Arab influence on our own. This complex history is intertwined with a social sense of collective guilt, trauma and memory. I part from this cultural heterogeneity in order to evaluate the importance of fluctuating identities: those are in eternal transition; displaced no matter where they go or stay.

As an experimental filmmaker and photographer, I give voice to narratives that were denied existence because of slippages of time. I work with the tension between the political and the personal body. Conflict, border, and power intersect, bruising us physically and socially. I re-envision histories, examine scars drawn by dichotomies of the mind versus the body. Politicizing personal experience, I make physical the language that is lost in translation. I navigate through self-effacement and societal expectations, in order to find and to represent negative time/space and everything that slips through it.  The work is the space between words, the cracks created by a romantic separation, and the negotiation between agency and chance.

In order to engage the viewer, I work with abstraction as a form of displacement; as a negotiation between providing access the work and respecting my artistic license; as accumulation of so many conceptual layers of meaning that their visual representation is reduced to a minimum. In my photographs and videos, faces become spectral traces of shadow and light – like sheets of vellum, trying to retain the paradoxical nature of quantum light. Occasionally, expressions stubbornly stick to the surface, without fading.  Those present absences are explored through ephemeral photographic transfers on latex - decaying bodies of certain femininity.

Biography

I am an experimental filmmaker and photographer originally from Spain. I am currently based in Chicago where I work as a freelance retoucher and documenter, while keeping an active artistic practice. I grew up in Madrid, Spain but have lived in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. I graduated with an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I have a bachelor degree in Communication from IE University, Spain and master in Photography and Design from Elisava School of Design and Engineering, Barcelona, Spain. I have exhibited and screened work at Galería Mitte, Centro Comercial Las Arenas, Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona and at the Nightingale Cinema, at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, and Expo Chicago Art Fair, all in Chicago, Illinois. My pieces Sexteto (Bad Girls Don’t Like Good Girls) and This is All You Need to Know have screened at Twisted Oyster Film Festival , ACS Gallery at the Zhou B. Art Center, Chicago, Il. In the light of that festival I have also led a workshop introducing middle school children to video art. I have also assisted video essayist and critic Kevin B. Lee with video editing and color correction of the film “Occupation” created in collaboration with the Chicago based “Fused Muse Ensemble”. I currently am a teaching artist assistant at Orozco Community School, in Chicago, within the in-school art program organized by the non-profit Changing Worlds. As of March 1st, 2017, I am part of the group show Fluctuating Identities, at Space in Art Gallery NY, Chelsea.