Alexandra Martens Serrano (b.1991 El Salvador/Netherlands) is a post-disciplinary artist and researcher currently based in Amsterdam.
Her practice explores the ways in which branches of knowledge production and the personal as much as global narratives they generate are configured, mediated, and transmitted. Her research focuses on sources of knowledge that may have been considered marginal: overlooked traditions, non-human perspectives, mythologies, and non-western histories, in order to construct a more inclusive concept of knowledge and reality. Influenced by a multicultural migratory upbringing, her practice and interests engage in the articulation and methodologies of alternative models of knowledge systems and the overlapping of liminal spaces and identities. Though her work is heavily research-based, she doesn’t attempt to communicate a fixed reality – on the contrary, rather a vision of what is unseen, or what is in constant interrelation.
Thinking about each installation as an ecosystem in which the artworks are active agents, the work takes shape in non-linear associative constellations composed of elements ranging from sculptures to drawings, text, and sound. Often presenting themselves as complex systems characterized by a wide range of life forms, inanimate objects and diverse technologies. Drawing from a broad range of inspirations – both ancient and futuristic – her research converges the development of techno-ecologies, which reverberate shadow discourses of magic realism, with intersectional ways of reconfiguring, ‘dubbing’, and entangling the world as it currently is, and as it speculatively could be. Using and blending traditional techniques and diverse materials with digital software; she engages the beyond-human identities and assemblages of objects and images within her practice with larger polyphonic frameworks and considerations of history, knowledge and narrative. Resonating with areas of linguistics, metaphysics, and bio-politics, her works are cultivated as vessels of alternative methods of thinking and communicating, as hybrid gestures in which various worlds may intersect and cross-pollinate.