Artists Vanessa Karin and María Abaddon present Memento amori (Remember to Love), a two-person exhibition featuring mostly previously unseen works created from their personal research, all converging on a common theme: love as experienced through the materiality of the body. The exhibition, curated by anthropologist and art critic Mijail Mitrovic, opens on December 6 at Espacio Súbito, a new independent space in Miraflores that provides a platform for visual languages ​​often excluded from the mainstream art scene. Many of the drawings in Memento amori have never been exhibited elsewhere due to the thematic and aesthetic restrictions that still persist in the local art scene regarding the representation of carnal desire. In this exhibition, the artists' work finally finds a space to unfold without censorship and delve deeper, also through soft sculpture, into the perception, vulnerability, and memory of the body. Mitrovic summarizes this convergence in a central idea of ​​the project: “Something of love appears where we believe we are faced with the raw ebb and flow of bodies. This seems to be the desire that has led María and Vanessa to link their proposals in an exhibition where both, in different ways, explore new ways of imagining contemporary love relationships.” In Memento amori, Vanessa Karin, a nationally recognized multidisciplinary artist, works with post-digital aesthetics and pop art to analyze how desirability is constructed and circulated in the age of hyper-images. Meanwhile, María Abaddon, a visual artist and cultural manager with a sustained career both in Peru and abroad, explores, through mediums such as textiles, installation, and sculpture, the dissidence of the body, fragility, desire, and the affective rituals that emerge in the face of everyday violence. Together they propose a reading of love that does not shy away from its emotional density or its critical power; they speak of the body to speak of love, and of love to question how we inhabit relationships today. Memento amori proposes to review the ways in which we understand love and contemporary relationships, not from inherited ideals, but from the palpable experience of the body, where it is possible to build other forms of encounter.

At first glance, the works presented here seem to suggest that bodily impulses dominate our encounters and exchanges, whether in the subtle touches and penetrations depicted by Vanessa, or in the extreme figurations where María dissolves the boundaries of bodies that devour, lick, and consume one another. In pairs, groups, or alone, there would be nothing here but visions of the struggles that lead each person to experience an individual ecstasy that, after all, separates and locates pleasure. However, it is revealing that María and Vanessa have chosen the imperative “remember to love” for this two-person exhibition. Alongside the reminders of life's finitude that the classical tradition of Western art introduced in paintings celebrating the possessions and power of the ruling classes centuries ago, the reminder to love points to another, less abstract dimension of experience. A dimension anchored in the body, from which something more than an ephemeral exchange can be built—an exchange that, once completed, returns us to the feeling of loneliness and emptiness characteristic of a life dominated by calculations and commerce. Thus, the idea that binds this exhibition returns us to a question about the figures of love today: far from romantic harmony, both artists show that today love is conceived from the materiality of the body and not from the bourgeois ideals of family unity for reproductive purposes. Something of love appears where we believe we are faced with the raw ebb and flow of bodies. Or that seems to be the desire that has led María and Vanessa to link their proposals in an exhibition where both, in different ways, explore new ways of imagining contemporary love relationships. Mijail Mitrovic