Tanya Aguiñiga: Weighted
NEW YORK, NY | albertz benda is pleased to announce Weighted, the gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Tanya Aguiñiga on view May 8th to June 21st, 2025. With Weighted, Aguiñiga imagines the gallery as a vessel, each artwork arranged throughout the four exhibition spaces along a narrative thread from head to toe of a cosmic entity rooted in the earth.
Weighted represents the body as an archive of ancient and living memory, illuminating all that is carried in a life, between generations, and into the future. The exhibition is a meditation on survival and collective empowerment, an all new body of artworks standing in as symbolic shards that make up the somatic cosmos of a human soul. In conversation with the experiences of border bodies, of femme bodies, of Black and brown bodies, of indigenous bodies, of trans and nonbinary bodies, Aguiñiga summons through craft practice an ancestral lineage of survival and togetherness. Aguiñiga employs methods of making that are central to her practice, traversing and layering many intersecting histories of craft. She tells a story in the languages of weaving and clay, combining fibers and earth matter in a dynamic interplay of tension and softness.
Aguiñiga conjures a monumental femme body united by a winding assemblage of cotton, copper, stone, and clay. The mind is a repository, containing the senses and a map of memories both ancestral and temporal. The chest is a protector of breath, serving as an energetic center that receives and releases, filtering and reintegrating trauma in an ongoing process of healing. The chest is wrapped within a tapestry of ceramic breasts, producing like milk the warp and weft of an unbreakable fabric of communal interconnection. The hands carry and shelter stones; they reach out to hold, feel, and make, suspended in an intricate web from the rafters to the concrete. The body’s forward motion is driven by bending knees, the fulcrum of movement, while the feet lead the fight, digging their heels into the primordial earth.
Weighted is a defiant celebration of the miraculous strength of marginalized bodies. Together, these works reject the corrosive forces of a world accelerating its project to police, incarcerate, and eradicate bodies whose existence threaten the hegemony of white patriarchy fighting violently against its inevitable obsolescence. Navigating the exhibition, viewers are invited to see each other through porous walls, to join in honoring the body as a sacred reservoir carrying the wisdom of ancestors to the future's children. Aguiñiga chooses materials that have their own memories, bodies, and lifetimes, which leave traces and embed each artwork with symbolic significance. Weighted is our collective body, a fabric of fragmented wholeness drawn together with cotton, copper, stone, and clay.