UNSEEN at Mélange 

Cologne, DE

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October 28th, 2021 - January 9th, 2022

 

The scent of tobacco lingers in the air. Yellow spot lights highlight the scene. A black circular table spins a book round. The windows are blocked while ambient sounds slowly expands in the two spaces.

 

UNSEEN is an exhibition exploring the artist's relationship to spirituality as a silent part of her Cuban identity. Gispert creates an environment centered around her first artist book of the same title, which honors divine women in the Afro-Atlantic Lucumí religion, also known as Santeria. The book presents new photographic work exploring the intimate spaces used to honour ancestors and deities in Latin-American households.

 

Gispert uses the exhibition space to catapult these images into existence with an ethereal quality, hanging as kaleidoscopic fabric prints in rooms infused with sound, scent and metallic sculptures reminiscent of ritual. Along with New York and Miami based musician, Joseph Chesson, Gispert composed a sound scape which melds subtropical atmospheres with a narration of her short science fiction tale featured in the book. The story is about a foreign explorer that appears washed up on a tropical alien land only to discover that this place holds a piece of her mysterious past.