The Last Performance

Yola Balanga (Luanda, Angola, 1994) lives and works in Luanda. She is currently doing a residency at Atelier Solar (Madrid), thanks to which she is being able to do this show at Galería Nueva and some others in Madrid, such as at Galería Reku.

She began her contact with art in theater and fashion, later graduating in Plastic and Visual Arts at the University of Luanda. She has exhibited her work in Madrid, Nigeria and Luanda. Balanga uses art as an element of transcendence and as a tool for sociopolitical and cultural questioning. She is often referred to as a visual artist or transdisciplinary female artist, but she prefers to present herself as a performer, since all of her artistic practice stems from that.

Some of the works that we find in the show deal with the daily struggles that women face during maternity. The machete, present in her hands in all of her photos, symbolizes the colonial revolution in her country. It is said that the colonizers were defeated with machetes. The titles of her works are inspired by emblematic phrases from political speeches. Yola Balanga wants to approach loneliness in motherhood as a state of individual warfare; being with a machete while she breastfeeds her daughter or her presence in collective places like the kitchen, next to the dining room table, trying to convey to the observer the constant state of a mother/woman.

We also find previous works of hers, such as the record of the work Casa de tinta, in which she reformulates the traditional rituals of her culture. The mud, water and oil serve to generate the stains on the floor and the wall that emanate from the movement of her body in space. This gesture is inspired by the ritual tradition of the transition from girl to woman.

In this exhibition we find her painting, in which her body appears again reduced to spots and simple shapes, simple colors and with a strong symbolic charge.

From July 25 to August 25, 2023

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