Marcela Cernadas

Marcela Cernadas, visual artist born in Campana, Argentina, in 1967, works with video, photography, installation, painting, sculpture, and poetry. As an active protagonist in the contemporary international scene, she participated with two works at the 50th Venice Biennaleand was invited to join the Miradas de Mujeres Festival in Madrid . Her works are present in public and private collections in Europe and the United States, as the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami and the Diocesan Museum of Venice, among others.

Her reflections consider art as a vital figure in itself and equal in value to the vital figures of food and light.

Food is the focus of many of her artworks. Food and the handling thereof; the banquet and its relationship with luxury; nutrition and its inextricable link with the essential, rituals and the vital are the main subjects of her works and a constellation of objects always present in her investigations. Her works explore the iconography of still life and many of them were conceived in kitchens and butcher shops, in the border areas of aesthetics, anthropology, and everyday life .

Light is another major theme of her artwork, as a subject and as a matter that emphasizes the ephemeral and essential aspects of her work . Fundamental in her urban installations and video projections in dialogue with space, it is also a key instrument to the study of transparency and opacity of Murano glass, a matter which also forms an important part of her sculptural works.

The influences of her journeys, polyglotism, and education marked her thinking and her work from an early age. In the late eighties she traveled to Paris to improve her French, and to Italy with a scholarship by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy to study the Italian language. In the early nineties she settled in Venice, a city that proved to be decisive in her poetry and her artistic career, and began an uninterrupted trip and cosmopolitan living in Italy, Spain, United States, and her native country. She went all over the great museums of western art, frequented the studios of many artists and, during her postgraduate studies in Visual Artsat the IUAV University in Venice, she met her professors: art historian Pierre Rosenberg, philosophers Franco Rella and Giorgio Agamben, and curators Carlos Basualdo and Hans Ulrich Obrist. It is to the latter that she wrote her first recipe of Elixir, included in the Do It Seminarand in Do It For/With Someone Else . Within the same context she met artists Grazia Toderi, who initiated her in the practice of video art, and Olafur Eliasson, with whom she filmed and starred Banquet, one of her first artworks on banquets, at her own Venetian house.