Disco Maumau (°2010, Naples, Italy) creates mixed media artworks, mixed media artworks and conceptual artworks. By using popular themes such as sexuality, family structure and violence, Maumau touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognised, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.
Her work urge us to renegotiate mixed media art as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. By putting the viewer on the wrong track, she makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.
Her works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her works directly respond to the surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences from the artist as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. By using an ever-growing archive of found documents to create autonomous artworks, she reflects on the closely related subjects of archive and memory. This often results in an examination of both the human need for ‘conclusive’ stories and the question whether anecdotes ‘fictionalise’ history.
Her works often refers to pop and mass culture. Using written and drawn symbols, a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined is created. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day-to-day context, she uses a visual vocabulary that addresses many different social and political issues. The work incorporates time as well as space – a fictional and experiential universe that only emerges bit by bit.
Her works bear strong political references. The possibility or the dream of the annulment of a (historically or socially) fixed identity is a constant focal point. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, she focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting.
Her works are often about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, she tries to create works in which the actual event still has to take place or just has ended: moments evocative of atmosphere and suspense that are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build-up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place.
She creates situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function. By applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different functions and/or contexts are created. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, she creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.
Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, she presents everyday objects as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Pompous writings and Utopian constructivist designs are juxtaposed with trivial objects. Categories are subtly reversed.
Her works are an investigation of concepts such as authenticity and objectivity by using an encyclopaedic approach and quasi-scientific precision and by referencing documentaries, ‘fact-fiction’ and popular scientific equivalents. With a conceptual approach, she tries to approach a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way, likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical and believes in the idea of function following form in a work.
Her works are given improper functions: significations are inversed and form and content merge. Shapes are dissociated from their original meaning, by which the system in which they normally function is exposed. Initially unambiguous meanings are shattered and disseminate endlessly.
Acevedo Hülsbusch Juana Joceline
Bidari Basavaraj Shrishail Bidari
Bonton Bonton Bontongone Nelly
Brasser Valentine Marie Caroline
De Torres Y Sandoval Ramón Argila
González Rojas Adriana Marcela
Hernández Hernández Alejandro José
Himmelsbach De Vries Domenique
International Resource Center For Art Cairo
Junior Dope Lord Illuminati Lives
Madam Cosmic Entrepreneur Mastermind
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Oliveira De Figueiredo Prashina
Patil (inspirational Speaker) Rakxit
Patricia Smyka Fathermoonandme
Payanene Velasquez Junior Haminton
Pedraza Eodriguez Emma Angelica
Plasencia Magdaleno Juan Moisés
Rodríguez Briseño Gustavo Daniel
Salas Dominguez Mayra Alejandra
Sigurdardottir Johanna Kristbjorg
Vanto Dumisani Vanto Dumfiasco
Vishva Naedurana Pathirannehelage