September 21 – December 1, 2024
32 Lisgar St and Park
Ofrenda (Offering), 2021, is a video that documents the artist removing a sieve mask pinned to their face, causing blood to fall on their naked, mud-covered body. The mask is traditionally worn in the “El Baile de las Negras” dance, originally from indigenous celebrations in Monimbó, Nicaragua. In the late 1970s was adopted by young rebels during the popular uprising against the dictatorship of Somoza. More recently, the masks have been embraced and reinterpreted by the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. After removing the mask, the artist chews and spits it out. The piece presents a ritual action that addresses the violence of mestizaje, the ideology of whitening, and the colonial wounds resulting from the erasure of queer and Indigenous heritage.
Most of Elyla’s work consisted of performances and actions that reclaims the public visibility of the queer body while confronting authoritarianism and censorship. They have developed a practice addressing the impact of mestizaje (miscegenation)—a term describing a notion of identity used since the colonization of the Americas by nation-states and nationalist discourses to eradicate the roots of Indigeneity and deny the existence of Indigenous peoples— and its contemporary rhetoric of inclusiveness and commodification of non-white identities.
Bio
Artist Bio
Elyla
Elyla (Chontales, 1989; they/them) is a performance artist and activist from Central America, Nicaragua. Their work deals with creating resistance to colonial, imperialist, and Western ideologies around the construction of identity politics and nation-state cultural narratives, specifically as it relates to mestizaje, queerness (cochoneidad), and indigenous ancestry. Elyla has presented their work at the IX/X Biennial of Nicaragua, IX/X Central American Biennials, and the XII Biennial of Havana, Cuba and is part of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa. The artist coined the term barro-mestiza to take distance from the traditional and colonial understanding of mestizaje during their ongoing process of decolonization. The artist’s early work dealt with contesting the patriarchal and repressive narratives upheld by the Latin American left and its effect on gender and sexually diverse people. In 2013, Elyla co-founded the Operación Queer/Cochona collective that blurred the limits between academia, art, and activism creating interventions in Mesoamerica. Their project Machete Dress was a grant recipient of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) 16th annual Grants & Commissions Program. Their work is part of the permanent collection at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, the Ortiz-Gurdian Art Foundation, KADIST videoart collection and private collectors around the world. Their work has been shown throughout Latin America, North America, Canada, Europe, and Asia. They currently live and work in Masaya, Nicaragua.
Exhibition Site
32 Lisgar St and Park
32 Lisgar St
Toronto ON
M6J 0C7