Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino
Peso
Exhibition
September 6 – November 2, 2024
Opening: Thursday, September 5, 6:00 PM


At Kunstverein Kevin Space, in their first solo exhibition in Austria, Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino presents a series of new works and unfolds a succession of interlinked trajectories centered on a complex operation of artistic labor. Even when—or mostly because—they choose abstraction as a somewhat of a refusal to figurative representation, the artist ponders and traces the theoretical, biographical, and historical research that informs their practice in addition to the intricate, fluctuating obscure characteristics, and productions of value in contemporary art that mirrors the institutionalization of contemporary society in relation to the colonial transatlantic project.

A score piece signed as Peso (the Portuguese word for weight, from which the exhibition borrows its title) reads "the artist's body weight in municipal water" and commands an action that takes up most of the tangible space in the show. In this work, metal canisters organized in multiples of four and eight compose quasi-cubic units that hold the specified material with particular attention to its local, regulated source. Adopting the form of a grid, its celebration of calculation, surface, and abstraction is juxtaposed with the particularity and heftiness of a characteristic of the artist's body that is at once quantifiable and cannot be captured fully. In a way, Peso (2024) speaks to navigations between visibility and opacity, facing the increasing demands for consumable identity and the dangers and reductions that come with it–to see art (as well as bodies and the world per se) through pre-established concepts, measuring it against and substitute it with what we already know. At the same time, its geometrical features may give enough space for other considerations, including its resemblance to the canisters carried by the artist's parents in their childhood with water collected from a river to supply the activities of their homes at the time.

Peso, coincidentally the currency name in various former colonies of the Spanish empire, is also a common term used to refer to money in hip-hop culture. With the exhibition, Celestino's explorations are located not merely in the complex economic and social inscriptions and transactions of power that art is embedded in but also in the latter’s determinations in the site and the act of reading artistic work. In developing the exhibition in close collaboration with their parents, the artist challenges a capacity to stretch their own agency in the material choices here.

By painting the ceiling of the exhibition space with a color chosen by their mother and broadcasting the only licensed radio station of their hometown, Buritizeiro, in Brazil, they emphasize language as a critical element in their practice and announce the susceptibility of employing the instrumentality of interpretation. Actively refusing to propose site-specific iterations and instead bringing written sentences that are, one can notice, as precise as they are open, Wisrah implies the possibility of multiple incidences of the same piece and, too, strips their complete control over the material translation of information (whether that is the content of the radio channel, their mother's subjective choice of color, or, their own current body weight). This intellectual exercise of collecting information rather than commodities is disturbed by Trophy (2024), an award statue won by the artist for a poetry competition in middle school, the only object brought from Brazil to Austria to be part of the show. Pointed towards the exhibition space, this work arguably presents an oxymoron at the heart of mediation of difference through language: namely, the impossibility of representational thought transgressing itself.

While the songs traversing the space through the open door gap and the fluctuant chromic information that fills the space's ceiling are visceral and perceptible elements," a set of local plants that are invasive elsewhere" are made absent from the actual exhibition site and are placed in the corridor and the garden of the building wherein Kevin is located. Almost inaccessible to the public, Gift (2024) invites a reflection to look into the context, political and otherwise, where the art organization is located with an (unrequested) present to the residents of the building it fronts while, too, alluding to the local, historical, and resiliently present continuities of colonialism within which the exhibition exists.

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino was born in 1989 in Buritizeiro, Brazil, and currently lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany. Through score, sculpture, drawing, text, photography, installation, sound, and video, the artist addresses the remaining structures of the transatlantic colonial project, focusing on institutional critique, language, and objecthood.

Their work has been shown in Germany and internationally, including exhibitions at Galerie Molitor, Berlin, Germany; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark; Kunsthal Nord, Aalborg, Denmark; Museu Nacional do República, Brasília, Brasil; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Berlin, Germany; Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba, Brazil; and the 14th Curitiba Biennial, Curitiba, Brazil. Celestino was awarded numerous grants, prizes, residencies, and fellowships, including the ars viva prize for visual arts 2025, Germany (Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft)

Peso, installation view, Kevin Space 2024. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Peso, installation view, Kevin Space 2024. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Peso, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Peso, installation view, Kevin Space 2024. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Peso, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Peso, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Peso, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Peso, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Ana, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Ana, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Peso, installation view, Kevin Space 2024. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Peso, installation view, Kevin Space 2024. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Trophy, 2024. Dimensions: 7.5 x 7.5 x 31 cm. Metal. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Gift, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Gift, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Gift, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Gift, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Gift, 2024. Variable materials and dimensions. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti