Corporeal Resistance

The project consists of approximately twelve works that blend and merge the boundaries between techniques and materials. It constitutes an exploration of conceptual connections and relationships, a space for investigating and experimenting with the appearance and qualities of matter and its symbolic potential.

“Corporeal Resistance” proposes the discovery of an entity that exists as both body and object, a process of becoming between objects and their physical and sociocultural aspects, and the body with its psychological, biological, and social implications. The project establishes associations between the mechanisms involved in the relationship between the body, production processes, and waste treatment.

The strategy behind the works is, in a way, to stimulate a visceral reaction that activates the inner psyche, creating new ways of observing the affections and connections between subjects and objects, between living bodies and inert matter. It is an encounter with oneself through an encounter with the other, with that which one anticipates or avoids, that which attracts or unsettles.

This project is based on the understanding that the body is our connection to the materiality of the world. It is an intricate network of relationships and actions in which conscious and unconscious, collective and individual mechanisms unfold. In this sense, “Corporeal Resistance” presents the body as a space of sociopolitical tensions, where something is processed through it and within it. The aim is therefore to reconsider the body through new connections that reveal its forms of resistance and the forces that govern it.

Another variable at play is the discarded condition of the materials used. A large proportion of these materials consists of remnants from the plastics industry. At first, the “remnant” is a byproduct of the processes that make possible the useful objects accepted and adopted in our society’s everyday life. These are forms of waste about which institutions remain silent: undesirable objects, monsters that reveal social hierarchies between what is accepted and what is rejected.

On a second level, however, one could argue that waste—particularly in contemporary society—is assigned meaning in an attempt to restore order. Waste is now classified, reused, studied, and given significance. This raises questions about the need for a society in which everything must be controlled and regulated. Garbage becomes a projection of our values and social relationships.

Both perspectives reveal an ambiguous materiality: what was once strange and improper is now incorporated. This highlights the paradox between the body and garbage, between bodies that cause discomfort and those that resist because of their poverty, those situated at the borders, those who are ill or aging, and those who are, to some extent, labeled grotesque. These are bodies that, even as they are rejected, are reintegrated and regulated. The issue, therefore, is to examine the strategies and hidden intentions behind normalization, the capacity of those who resist to reinvent themselves, and how we are affected by being both victims and perpetrators of systems of control.

Curatorial Texts

Juan Diego Roldán

Sophia Wanamaker Gallery, Costa Rican-North American Cultural Center

Karla Herencia is a Costa Rican artist whose current work, as presented in this exhibition, focuses on the aesthetic relationships between objects, their perception, and the materials from which they originate. This combination leads us to resist, to experience doubt, empathy, or rejection toward forms and entities that suggest an apparent reality and challenge our perception. In doing so, it opens a discussion around these stimuli-generating forms and the ideas they provoke.

The provocation is subtle yet persistent in every component of the exhibition. Taken as a whole, the works establish a cross-cutting dialogue that connects their individual conversations and draws the viewer’s gaze back to them. The spectator becomes a curious analyst, deciphering the organic and material sensations of remnants and waste, which seem to form a riddle drawn from a familiar reality.

Karla Herencia is one of the emerging artists with great promise in the realm of the sublime object—that which generates an aesthetic experience. She confronts the viewer with the challenge of sensations produced through assemblages with organic qualities or forms defined by collective conventions of shape and appearance.

This is an exercise in reconstructing reality. Its strategy is to connect variables within the complex question of how much perception plays with our minds, and how much our minds themselves compel us to assign shape and name to that which we cannot immediately and automatically grasp or abstract.

Connecting the body with society’s waste, binding meanings together to make visible that which is denied because it is different or strange: this dialogue approaches a truth defined through perception, mediated by sensory factors. All of this unleashes emotional reactions and thoughts that the artist examines in order to understand, through an aesthetic of sensory intuition, a human being bound to the idea of a particular reality—a reality resolved within the apparent and confusing environment that surrounds us.

Efraín Hernández Villalobos

Curator, Academic, and Researcher
School of Art and Visual Communication, CIDEA, National University

Form and Thought in the Work of Karla Herencia

Today, young artists are moving away from modern approaches to art-making and venturing into forms and processes of image production that respond to new needs for expression and social engagement.

Emerging artistic forms connected to postmodern practices lead young artists to seek out materials and processes that can serve as vehicles for communicating the concepts and discourses they wish to present to the public, regardless of their nature.

From this perspective, any material can be transformed into a medium for communication through art. Likewise, the methods used to construct and develop artistic proposals may take many different forms, guided primarily by the concept that drives the artist in multiple directions toward the realization of an intended goal.

Karla Herencia’s work, the result of a serious and systematic process of study, follows this path. Her practice seeks to communicate ideas related to the cultural and social issues of our time. Certain elements associated with deconstructive processes grounded in critical theory emerge as central themes shaping Herencia’s work.

In Corporeal Resistance, the title given by the artist to this exhibition, a visual field emerges, permeated by ambivalence and the idea of transformation. Starting from forms that evoke organic matter and the body without fully becoming either, Karla constructs objects that we understand through the language of visual art, governed by color, texture, form, and the use of space.

Despite these qualities, the resulting pieces do not resemble the visual forms characteristic of modern art. If we were to identify a historical art reference, the name Eva Hesse would probably come to mind first. The condition of being “formless” and “organic,” perhaps visceral to some viewers, is what most closely connects Herencia’s work to this lineage.

The artist is interested in constructing hybrids that inhabit territories beyond the categories of object or painting, imbued with a formal identity that associates them with the body. This idea of the body transcends the purely physical and organic, as Herencia also endows it with meanings related to sociocultural aspects present in our collective imagination, evoked through corporeal organicity.

A sense of uncertainty permeates the works, serving as an intention to awaken tension and juxtaposition between materialities and meanings that extend into both individual and social worlds. The handmade and the artistic, artifice and nature, certainty and ambiguity are continually transformed into a play of opposites within the viewer’s mind.

The artist also establishes a contrast between the mechanical processes characteristic of industrial production, which generate waste, and the processes of artistic and artisanal creation, which fundamentally result from manual labor. At this level, the proposal brings human acts of creation and destruction into opposition, revealing different dimensions of social and economic practices and the ways in which meaning is assigned.

Herencia’s research for this exhibition draws on concepts developed through engagement with sociological studies of waste. This dimension, which encompasses aspects of contemporary economics, society, and culture, raises questions about our attitudes toward waste: an undesirable discard that nevertheless forms part of the process through which prestigious and desirable objects are created. In this way, the social contradictions and tensions between what is accepted and what is discarded or rejected as undesirable become apparent.

When Karla’s materials change their “cultural location” and enter the realm of art, they are regulated, recovered, and incorporated into a system of status. This process operates as a metamorphosis that re-signifies their material condition as waste. Through this transformation of meaning and status, Karla “invents” a form of regeneration or “normalization” that occurs as the materials move from one condition to another.

Upon entering the realm of visual representation, this recent “invention” generates a paradox that invites reflection on the assignment of meaning and on the uses of materials and objects within cultural dynamics.

The artist nevertheless states that her intention is not to “normalize,” but rather to “demonstrate that what is considered normal can be just as abnormal, and vice versa.” Herencia reaffirms that “perceptions of one thing or another overflow their boundaries.” In the realm of lived experience, she believes, the perception of reality and reality itself are constantly shifting. Objects and bodies challenge the conventions constructed around them.

Regarding her work, Herencia states:

“For me, the artwork is an instrument for reflecting on the process of signification. I therefore seek to create models of connectivity—that is, forms that materialize and make possible connections between the physical, material qualities of an object and the subjective, psycho-emotional projections stimulated through a subject’s sensory perceptions.”

This is what Herencia understands as the “embodiment” of what takes place through and within the body. The artist also explains that spatial dimensions play a role in this process, understood as everything that emerges from the environment or system in which bodies and objects are situated.

To achieve this purpose, Karla emphasizes, in particular, “rebellious objects that test the systems to which they belong—waste and the art object.” At the same time, she highlights “bodies that challenge social canons and conventions,” creating zones of rupture through a disruptive gesture that becomes central to her artistic proposal.

The artist is interested in approaching her practice through experimentation, exploration, and constant change. The formal configuration of her pieces embodies this condition, giving the works a dimension in which art is understood as a “living body,” constantly resisting the categories that seek to classify it as one thing or another.

At the heart of this proposal lies indeterminacy: a territory in which things appear and suggest, yet are not what they lead us to believe they are. The familiar and the uncanny, the fragile and the stable, the natural and the artificial, the animal and the human, order and randomness, the visceral and the plastic-visual converge like a chrysalis ready to transform at any moment and surprise us once again with different and unexpected metamorphoses.

José Pablo Solís Barquero

Director, School of Art and Visual Communication, CIDEA, National University

Karla Herencia is a graduate and faculty member of the School of Art and Visual Communication at the National University. I have had the privilege of observing the working process of this artist, who began in design, moved into painting, and now presents this solo exhibition through perseverance and a strong sense of responsibility.

She begins her journey as a visual artist with her exhibition Corporeal Resistance. Her gaze turns toward being, femininity, and an inner world transformed into an aesthetic object through a specifically sculptural practice. Her work raises questions that invite viewers to engage openly with different realities, exploring the visual and material dimension while allowing meaning to remain open.

Threads, lines, convergences, points, fibers, painting, sculpture, objects, interiority, and conceptual principles establish a foundation for visual communication, anchoring and redirecting the semiotic interpretation of the literal body and the intimate. The work shifts the focus from trauma toward an examination of the visual language of resistance, wrapping and weaving a complex fabric materialized in objects that emerge from an action and a gesture.

The artist offers a transformation of the body through porosity and the notion of the social body, one that refuses to submit to structure and instead rebels against imposition. This boundary confronts a duality between the aesthetic, the action, and the pragmatic.

The effects of these objects are not merely psychological; they also bear the marks of the body’s history. On the one hand, there is a fabric full of holes; on the other, lines that open up an interpretation of the complexity of resistance—not only resistance to deprivation, but also the act of surviving in a global world that erases, oppresses, and empties us.

For the Costa Rican-North American Cultural Center, this exhibition represents an opportunity to open its doors to emerging contemporary artistic proposals and to curatorial practice, allowing Costa Rican audiences to engage critically with a vision of the context in which we live.