Patricia Domínguez
Liquid Mantras
27. Juni – 24. August 2025
Kunstverein Arnsberg presents the third exhibition as part of the VERSUMPFUNG programme. In her solo exhibition Liquid Mantras, Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez focuses on the access to water in the age of privatised natural resources. She directs it towards forms of weeping and healing with regard to rituals, spirituality and resilience in an increasingly digital present. Domínguez describes her work as a ritualised practice in which digital and real elements merge. As she materialises the digital and mixes it with real elements and memories, she highlights mutual influences on a planetary togetherness. Her artistic work can be understood as a late capitalist hacking - like a stomach digesting current systems and rearranging them in a futuristic sci-fi aesthetic or better spi-fi (spiritual fiction).
As an artist and activist, she seeks to rethink our planetary relationships and propose ways of being together and coexisting. Water, or more precisely the loss of water, is a central theme in Liquid Mantras. The exhibition begins with a direct insight into Domínguez‘s worldview, which emphasises community and collaboration. It features works on paper by her and her immediate female artistic-activist community under the title ‘Aguas etéricas’ [Ethereal Waters]. In 2020, Domínguez began the research project GaiaGuardianxs, which combines text, installation and video and looks at the impact of biopower on contemporary eco-social conflicts in Latin America. The exhibition will include a digital publication that summarises three years of research and sheds light on the conflict over access to water in the province of Petorca in Chile.
The work La balada de las sirenas secas [The ballad of the dry mermaids] was also created in collaboration. Developed with the women‘s collective Mujeres del agua, which is associated with the environmental protection organisation MODATIMA (Movement for Access to Water, Land and Environmental Protection), it draws attention to the scarcity of water due to increasing water privatisation. The installation is reminiscent of a shrine, for which organic elements have been combined with technological objects and low-fi components. In the centre of the installation there is a screen mounted vertically on an altar made of dry earth. A dark, mermaid-like figure covered in LED lights kneels in front of it in a votive gesture, a moment of mourning or prayer. The grim faces of thirsty and contemptuous avocado-shaped heads complete the scene.
The Hanging Testicles and the She-Spirit of Water continues Domínguez‘s call against the privatisation of water in Chile, first introduced in 1984 under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Under current legislation and in violation of human rights, fresh water is diverted to irrigate large-scale avocado farms in the province of Petorca, in collusion with politicians and to the disadvantage of the local, often indigenous, population. The title of the work (a subtle criticism of patriarchy) also refers to the Aztec origin of the word “avocado” -āhuacatl, meaning “testicle”.
The last room of the exhibition is dedicated to a facsimile of the Troano Codex, one of the four surviving pre-Columbian Maya books. This codex, written in hieroglyphics on bark paper, dates back to the period between 900 and 1521 and contains almanacs that served as manuals for prophecies and prognostication. The records of astrological systems and ideas provide insights into the rituals and calendar systems of the Maya. The artefact is positioned on a mirror shelf so that it resonates in the room to the sounds of two spiritual meditations on water worlds created for Gaiaguardianxs by her mentor Nicole Postel. Visitors are invited to turn inwards, enter a meditative state of consciousness and connect with the spirit of water.
The exhibition Liquid Mantras can be understood as an analysis of the role of water as a fighting and sometimes deadly force. The various works can be interpreted as ritualised acts of empowerment. They not only thematise vulnerabilities, but also open up paths for the articulation of new collective voices.
Patricia Domínguez (born 1984, Santiago, Chile, lives and works in Puchuncaví, Chile) draws upon myths, symbols, rituals and healing practices, combining artistic imagination with experimental research on ethnobotany. Domínguez works with watercolours, ceramics, sculptural assemblages and video installations to create shrine-like imagery derived from a visual vocabulary that spans from plant life, mass market goods, corporate wellness schemes and the digital world. Patricia Domínguez has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum (New York), WAMx (Finland), CentroCentro (Madrid), Gasworks (London), TBA21 Collection at C3A (Córdoba), Sala CCU (Santiago), Galería Patricia Ready (Santiago), and ARCO Madrid. She has been chosen as artist in residence at ALMA (Chile) + CERN (Switzerland), Gasworks (London), Meet Factory (Prague), AIM Bronx Museum (NY), R.A.T. (Mexico), FLORA ars + natura (Bogota), The Institute of Critical Zoologists (Singapore), Sandarbh Residency (Partapur, India), and American Museum of Natural History (New York). She has recently received the Botín Foundation Visual Arts Grant (2022), the CERN+ Symmetry Grant and the AMA-Gasworks Grant, among others. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, New York. She has a BA in Art from PUC, Chile, and studied Botanical and Natural Science Illustration at the New York Botanical Garden. She runs the experimental ethnobotanical platform Studio Vegetalista.
