Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s 'Filiación abono (Dung Kinship)' (2024) at the Toronto Biennial of Art




KADIST and the Toronto Biennial of Art will premiere a new commission by Naomi Rincón Gallardo at the Toronto Biennial of Art 2024
The premiere of Filiación abono (Dung Kinship) (2024) follows the presentation of a prelude of the work by Rincón Gallardo which was first presented as part of the exhibition Pies bajo fuego: Sobre el despojo [Feet Under Fire: On Dispossession], an exhibition in collaboration with and presented at MAC Panama curated by Miguel A. López. The Toronto Biennial of Art 2024: Precarious Joys is curated by Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López.
Filiación abono (Dung Kinship) is a two-channel video installation that unfolds a musical journey through the underground, the mineral, the mycelium, and the unconscious, delving into the transformation of matter into fertile soil as a metaphor of the necessary transformation and reinvention upon ecosocial collapse. The hallucinatory hybrid creatures that appear in the video are intimately intertwined: motorcycling flies, a dung beetle, mushroom-children, go-go dancers, psilocybe mushrooms that grow in dung, bastardized versions of Tlalzoteótl (the Mesoamerican deity related to sexuality, filth, and fertility) and Xochipilli (a deity related to dance, art, flowers, and male homosexuality). Together, they revel in the generative decomposition process that occurs beneath a territory where drones buzz and a war march resounds.
Rincón Gallardo enunciates her work from a country where disappearances and clandestine graves proliferate. From there she envisages the humus in which what has been discarded and putrefied is mixed as a generative process that is in turn intertwined with the remains of bodies. Waste becomes the food of the worlds we narrate. By gaining access to this underworld, viewers are faced with the complex beauty of decomposition processes occurring beneath our feet.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo is a research, performance, and video artist who synthesizes tech, cuir (rather than queer), pop, and kitsch culture in her work. Through a framework that centers decolonial feminisms and cuir perspectives, her work fabricates narratives of desire, dissidence, and resilience based on Mesoamerican mythologies.
The Toronto Biennial of Art’s mission is to make contemporary art accessible to everyone. A ten-week event every two years, the Biennial commissions artists to create new works for a city-wide exhibition in dialogue with Toronto’s diverse local contexts. Year-round public and learning programs bridge Biennials and invite intergenerational audiences to explore the ideas that inspire our events. Building upon past editions and offering new ways of seeing and listening, each Biennial connects people to spark meaningful dialogues and imagine new futures.