Victory
Wellington 2020
Julia Orquera Bianco
The artist works to recreate and maintain the image of The Winged Victory of Samothrace in a shipping container, as a piece of living sculpture and scene-making. As one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world Winged Victotry stands as an icon of Western Civilization, originally made to honor a sea battle and installed a rostral pedestal of gray marble representing the prow of a ship. While creating a revolution in cargo transportation and international trade, shipping containers have been used systematically for the smuggling of migrants and human trafficking, as a result of the humanitarian crisis we live in today.
The artist's personal experience as an alien showed her time and time again the contradictions inherent to the migrant experience and the big gap between expectation and reality in it. In this piece, she problematize the Victory of Samothrace as a symbol connected to ideas of linear progress and order, to insert parallel narratives and the chaotic, asymmetrical and tragic aspect of the human experience.
Born in Argentina and lived in Mexico and the United States, Julia Orquera Bianco attended Escuela de Arte Fotográfico de Avellaneda, where she specialized in Photography. In 2011, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting from Universidad del Museo Social Argentino (Buenos Aires, Argentina). In 2018, she graduated from the MFA program at Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Her art practice interrogates her everyday experience as an alien in the U.S. through addressing collective and personal heritage as a platform to create objects, installations and time-based media that put into evidence identity as a fragile construct, constantly in motion, influenced by the past but re-contextualized and impacted by the present and the place. Her latest work explores alternative formats through the use of common materials in unconventional ways. Her work has been showcased inArgentina, Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Supported by Wellington City Council Public Art Fund