OJO DE CABRA

curaduria y texto por Carla Barbero:

An ingredient in a potion and an occult symbol, Nina Kovensky's "Goat's Eye" offers updates to the ancient spell that envelops curiosity about images, especially those whose hungry magic pursues leaks, reflections, and rebounds. Nina is a friend of the plasticity of reality, approaches representations through play, and, leaping with her attention, embraces visual atmospheres that range from the domestic to the epiphanic.
There is something of a coven in Nina and her work, in her familial and artistic lineage, in her ways of moving through art, always accompanied and like a magnet attracting poetry, cables, and bodies in multiple urban interferences. This exhibition, which I could say is her first solo exhibition in a stable format and whose works she has been working on for over a year, is composed of series that reflect both that journey and a more concentrated creative moment.
Portraits of friends, family, colleagues, and strangers are the first works that greet us. Photographed with her phone, the artist uses a circular mirror to capture these encounters. This trick means they cannot see themselves; Nina captures their fleeting faces. From "Selfins" (2019-2020) we can see this brief selection of countless photos in which she aims to bring people's lunar side closer and, even more, also crystallize the network of affects, reflections, and contexts that form her great society of living art. Because although technology is always present in Nina's works, reducing its poetics to materiality is, at the very least, petty. As a digital native, the artist fluidly embraces hypermediated language to appropriate its plastic qualities and recreate other sensibilities closer to the mystery of the human spirit than to the materialist critique of information flows. Her practices seek to cultivate the alchemy of the senses, and to do so, she chooses the beam of light that hits a railing, almost any shiny surface, telephones, and rituals.
As a counterpoint, immediately after the portraits, the shadow of a hand is observed. Printed in grayscale on poster paper and glued to the wall, the austerity of this piece's montage acts as a reminder of the previous gesture. The shadow is a counter-reflection with a bad reputation, but here a single image is enough to remind us that it is ephemeral and personal, as atavistic as it is elusive. On another wall, however, a multitude of surveillance cameras constructed from mirrors buzz like insects. "Diminished Reality" (2018) was first exhibited with the intention of referring to paranoia and social control. In this new context, and with a montage that dilutes the functions they allude to, the cameras finally open up to paradox. A tech sky with flying insects hovering over a narcissistic, quarantined society. Each shiny bug stares back at us, appearance exiled from significance.
Continuing with her previous works, this exhibition concentrates Nina's explorations with mirrored material and encourages a conceptual shift that leans toward the symbolic. "Apple Lung" (2020) embodies the screen-window analogy so central to our times. Looking out from her balcony each night, she witnessed the sequence of lights in the windows of her neighborhood's neighbors, their colors and scenes. However, what she recovers from that vision is color temperature and a deviant idea about the horizon. Like portals, each drawing, joined to a larger ensemble, constructs a dynamic symbolic landscape.
There is a popular saying that goes "a crazy eye is never wrong," and perhaps it is related to another that underestimates the character of goats. With their rectangular pupils, these animals sharpen their vision to survive against predators. Panoramic sensitivity is a sharp antenna; it can connect distant points in time and space. Nina's works do something similar, connecting events, ideas, and emotions that challenge the language of technique for the illusion of play and the vibrant, volatile nature of the image.

INTERVENCIÓN OJO DE CABRA NINA KOVENSKY / QUEEN COBRA + LADY GABA