Alexandra Martens Serrano (El Salvador/Netherlands) is an artist and researcher currently based in Amsterdam. Reflecting her personal cultural hybridity, her post-disciplinary practice retains knowledge of the specificities of disciplines and of their histories, but is also inherently transgressive and capable of operating outside the limitations imposed by those.
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 possible 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.
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. 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.
Alexandra Martens Serrano
El Salvador / The Netherlands
Based in Amsterdam (NL)
https://pixelfed.social/Alexandramartensserrano
https://www.instagram.com/a.martensserrano/
Education
Residencies
2024 Studio Quantum, GAS Foundation x Goethe Institute, Lagos, Nigeria
2021 POST, Arnhem, The Netherlands
2019 LAGOS, Mexico City, Mexico
2018 Deltaworkers, New Orleans, Louisiana U.S.A
2016 Billytown, The Hague, The Netherlands
Autonomous Research Residencies
2018 Anthropomorphism within the Metropolis: Experimental project on ways of translating environments as identities, Mexico City
2017 Labor of (Eco)nomic Performances in Wake of Heat Waves: San Salvador (El Salvador) and Tikal (Guatemala)
2016 Artefact as Pursuit of Intimate Transaction, Santiago (Chile)