Open Skins / 13 years of performance art will show more than twenty-five performative works I created from 2006 to 2019, exploring (in most cases) the feminine, loss, and transformation. “Open Skins,” a multi-sited event taking place during the months of October and November 2021, features two exhibitions, the launching of a new website, and a work-in-process artist book. The work spans from when I was a graduate student at Pratt Institute in New York and concludes in 2019 during The Encuentro, organized by The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in Mexico City.

“Open Skins” marks the closing of one creative phase in order to give space to a new cycle of works. It is an exercise of unearthing the symbols that have been generated and embodied throughout these performative actions, to create a mesh or map of relations of actions, objects and characters. Over time, these symbols have become my language, a type of my micro-cosmos of my psyche. This body of work is also a reflection of my creative process: how I create and what motivates me. My work has been deeply personal yet with a strong sense of the audience’s presence. The performances, mostly in public spaces, have been created with a structure to be completed and interpreted by the passerby. Often through ritualistic actions, through an interplay of personal states of vulnerability and power, relating to the other becomes essential.

I understand my performances in two ways: one - through a categorization of how they were created and how they were meant to be experienced, that is any of these categories: Stage, Participatory, Actions and Impromptu, for the Camera or Collaborations. And two - through a series of symbols each work encircles through the actions, objects and characters.

A recurrent symbol in my work is skin, more than in the corporeal sense, skin as a cover or layer; along “skin” there are the acts of covering and uncovering, dressing and undressing, blindfolding, wrapping, peeling, and piling. This unit of symbols represents for me a human reality in which we never can see the whole; as something appears, something else disappears. We cannot grasp a totality: something closes as something else opens. In “Open Skins” each individual performance is a layer of a non-totality, and these layers are open, to be touched and possibly re-lived, through its remnants.

In this sense, “Open Skins” is a retrospective, an opportunity to look back. A pause, much like our current time, to gather what we have, what we have created, given and taken as we continue on, building, destroying, rebuilding, growing and tending to our skins.

POLINA PORRAS SIVOLOBOVA is a Russian-Mexican artist, nomad, educator and entrepreneur.

Polina creates artist books, videos and works on paper of narratives of possible futures which explore relationships between humans, technology and environment. In her artwork, the female figure takes center stage in a world of myth, symbolism and cultural syncretism.

Polina’s nomadic, pedagogical and entrepreneurial practices merge into the project “Travel with Polina” where she connects artists, communities and thinkers to explore topics of social justice, sustainability, cultural diversity, local art and craft practices through open channels of communication and cultural immersion. Her research projects engage in the study of diverse models of social and land sovereignty and sustainability within a pedagogical and artistic framework. Polina creates designs and performance productions of magical worlds and nomadic people.