Silvia Rivas

What’s On

Exhibition

Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025
Silvia Rivas, Buzzing Dynamics, 2010
©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee
Photo: ToLoLo studio

Description

Buzzing Dynamics

Silvia Rivas has been recognized as a pioneer of transdisciplinary expression in the realms of video installation and performance in Argentina and throughout Latin America since the early 1990s. Through experimental works, she has deepened her exploration of the relationship between video and the body, concepts of time, and the situations in which human beings find themselves. Rivas’s works evoke the universal, yet are simultaneously situated in the present moment, fostering associations based on concrete experiences.
In Buzzing Dynamics (2010), flies and hands attempting to swat them away appear in a continuous series of short scenes, with both moving interactively. The process unfolds in a cycle that begins with a single fly multiplying into an overwhelming swarm, which is then dispersed, and finally converges back into the original fly. The buzzing of wings, combined with the obsessive repetition of the simple motion of swatting flies, generates unease and amplifies anxiety and irritation. The temporal development of the video is structured based on action and reaction, state and progression. The scene in this video, born from the interaction between the human and the non-human, is a transmission of meaning: a metaphor. The flies are visible traces in the invisible and delicate relationships between human beings and reality, symbols, and diverse situations in imaginary contexts, while the buzzing indicates coincidence or, more precisely, the discordance between cause and effect.

Venue

Aichi Arts Center 8F
Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art

Profile

Born 1957 in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Based in Buenos Aires, Argentine.

Silvia Rivas is recognized for her video-installation, performances and the articulation of objects in space, she is considered a pioneer inter-disciplinary artist in Argentine and Latin America. Since the nineties, she has incorporated various supports and technologies according to its metaphorical potential for investigating the concept of time and the human condition. Rivas seeks to generate concrete experiential associations, conjuring reflections that are at once universal and situated. In her vision, an attitude of tenacious resistance, firmly applied to their perception of the present moment, is the subject’s resource facing a turbulent context. Her work problematizes the presumed realism of the moving image in order to reflect on the power of the audiovisual storytelling, to wonder about the images and their references. She has numerous group and individual exhibitions in art institutions and her works belong to several national and international private and public collections.

Selected exhibitions

2024: Solo exhibition, Cronotopias, Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (Colombia)
2010: Solo exhibition, Zumbido, Contemporáneo 26, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Argentina)
2005: 5th Mercosur Biennale: Direções no Novo Espaço (Porto Alegre, Brazil)
2004: Solo exhibition, Everything from the outside, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Argentina)
2003: 8th Havana Biennial: Art with life, Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Center (Cuba)

“Buzzing Dynamics” (video still) 2010