"CORIUM" EXHIBITION IN LISBON

Humans have been leaving their marks behind for as long as they first walked the Earth. The act of leaving a piece of us - a doodle on a wall, a painting using natural pigments or a photograph that documents a moment - has always been a way of immortalizing ideas from a specific moment in time. Similarly to a tattoo, these marks exist in between the layers of our realities, sometimes behind screens, other times underneath skin tissue. With the internet’s efficiency and the ever expanding role of social platforms within the arts, we’ve been slowly building a dense database of images that circulate throughout our feeds and ultimately our psyches.

By freezing reality through a photograph, we reveal our desire for movement towards what comes next. The commitment of leaving something behind because we must move somewhere else has become the artwork in itself.

CORIUM is a latin word that describes the skin layers that exist in between the epidermis and the subcutaneous tissue. This is where the ink from a tattoo stays as well. Part of the @a__b__c__c collective from Lisbon, artists Alexandre Camarao and Bernardo Simões Correia started to compile images found online to work with by transforming them into something new. The word CORIUM itself contextualizes the nature of the exhibition, in which the posters live in and out of the gallery walls. Posters were made and also plastered on the streets of Lisbon weaving a broader relationship between what lives inside galleries and outside of them.

The works penetrate our psyches, our art spaces and our streets, the same way a tattoo machine gun penetrates our dermis. But what exactly are those images? What are their sources and how did we get to where we are: a vast universe of images, moving rapidly from one device to the next? CORIUM explores our relationship with this rich and never ending stream of visuals.

The exhibition will be on view until September 19th, 2020 at @broteria_