A.K. Burns (1975, Capitola, USA), lives and works in New York (USA).
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A.K. Burns questions the limits and intrinsic properties of the body, seen as protean, porous and permeable to its environment.
Assemblages improvised from commonplace or industrial materials, the two sculptures presented in the exhibition have the appearance of outstretched arms – could they be from the same body? One holds a torch made out of a half-burnt newspaper, the other an empty water container of lurid, chemical tinge. Referencing fire and water, the artist reproduces the cycle of natural resource depletion: the charcoal of the sculpture’s base, produced by the action of fire, is used to purify the polluted water we consume, and it is the lack of water that causes ever more frequent and devastating forest fires.
The torch raised to the skies makes reference to the Statue of Liberty, its title, Marianne Deludes the World, to the symbolic personification of the French Republic. Two female allegories of liberty, then, are represented here by skeletal limbs, the artist seemingly alluding to the collapse of the ideologies of modernity, the shrinkage of democratic space and the end of history understood as permanent progress.
Hands outstretched in an appeal for help, or fists raised to rouse the crowd – the two phantom bodies seem pervaded by the political and environmental conflicts all around us. They are an appeal for awareness, a prompt to action.


