"Voiceover", Mar Arza at the Virreina Centre de la Imatge

Sotaveu is the first anthological exhibition on the work of Mar Arza (Castelló de la Plana, 1976). It presents seven unpublished pieces, conceived for this exhibition, alongside a series of works that were carried out between 1997 and the present.

The trajectory of Mar Arza evolves from the interior of a subtle, meticulous and at the same time firm poetic, in which we are called to "read intensely." Thus, against a certain implicit arrogance in any discourse - the author invested with authority - her projects request a gaze and even a position attentive to what is withheld and resists being perceived unequivocally.

Language, or rather, the background of words, the ways in which they contribute to dissent, plays a crucial role in the artist's grammars, which not only dealt with the abstractions that underlie any message, but especially with its strict materialities, from the meaning of a typography to image construction systems or the corporeality of a symbol.

The Colombian writer Juan Cárdenas identifies lightness as "a sign of great art, one that seems to float and avoids taking itself seriously." Indeed, that lightness, that is, ideas emancipated from the heavy solemnity of doctrine, is found as the foundation in a large part of Mar Arza's works, even in those that unmask how the arts have represented and stigmatized women's social place, and how it has historically influenced them.

Hence come her rescues on femininity policies developed as underground currents, her reinterpretations of insubordinations that conspired against their successive hegemonies, woven in the cracks of memory, undetectable but firm, sometimes fragile and secret, always advancing to point out what is ready to fly and what sinks.

All of Mar Arza's work is situated in a kind of epistemological blink that allows us to see the face and tools of what is urgent and what deserves to be rethought, transmitted in a different way. And it's that, when certainties are scarce, when nihilism becomes an empty ornament, and above all, when it's time to speak, we need artists to make perplexity a manifesto, connecting urgencies with metaphors.

Blanca Varela, the great Peruvian poet, wrote wonderful verses, talking about the rebellion that is unleashed when our vulnerabilities unite. They say: "slowness is beauty / I copy these foreign lines / I breathe / I accept the light / under the sparse air of November / under the colorless grass / under the cracked sky / gray / I accept mourning and celebration".

Sotaveu can be visited for free from Tuesday to Sunday (and holidays) from 11 am to 8 pm.