Leonor Serrano Rivas
Málaga, Spain, 1986
The dream Follows the Mouth (of the one who interprets it) -El sueño sigue la boca (de aquel que lo interpreta)-, 2018
Audiovisual installation: sculptures and video (2 channels)
Dimensions variable
Acquired 2018

Leonor Serrano Rivas employs sculpture, performance, film, drawing, audio and text, to create immersive installations with a strong reference to theatre. Her three-dimensional narratives seamlessly blend the space in the projected images with the physicality of the exhibition space. These performative and sculptural compositions often involve the audience entering a stage, thus collapsing figure-background hierarchies and transforming the viewer into a beholder or an active agent in the space.

Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, a 1935 text by the French writer and theoretician Roger Caillois (1913-1978), is the core source of inspiration for the choreographed action featured in this two-channel video work. Serrano Rivas’s stage-like work comprises two facing screens between which she has placed a group of blown glass and metal sculptures. The screens show the same video (played simultaneously but at different start times and at a different scale) of a group of women performing a choreography of erratic movements, creating a backdrop to a non-existent play, while another woman, like a puppeteer, creates the foreground.