Leyla Cárdenas

Leyla Cardenas’ work engages with notions of absence, memory, history, destruction, accumulation and mutability through extractive processes that culminate in large-scale, delicate installations that render perceptible the elusive idea of time. Addressing the weight, length, and accumulation of time, Cardenas’ method involves the removal of strata from surfaces of old, unattended buildings, and the subsequent reconstruction of fragments that give evidence of an obliterated past. In an act of resistance against oblivion, Cardenas embraces destruction by literally bringing to her work layers of time and history that inevitably reshape the present.

In collaboration with Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council