Puerto Rican artist Sofía Córdova in the group show “somatic significations” at Pro Arts, Oakland

The three artists in somatic significations consider the transformative agency of subjectivity through their interdisciplinary practices. Sofía Cordova, Xandra Ibarra, and Yetunde Olagbaju reject, reconstruct, and recover narratives of identity using a wide range of media. Connecting their complex creative processes is an underlying emphasis on performativity.Performance enables the artists to traverse between the internal (personal) and external (environment) to generate new translations of past, present, and future. Works included in this exhibition engage and transcend the corporeal to underscore themes of ritual, identity, and visibility. Taken together they bring forth radical and vulnerable understandings of self, time, and place at a moment when new agency and significations are desperately needed to reconcile a landscape of turmoil and inequity.— Kara Q. Smith, curator

Sofia Cordova  

Sofía Córdova: Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland, Sofía Córdovacreates new media interventions that explore sci-fi, futurity, extinction and mutation, especially as they relate to human acceleration of climate change under the conditions of late capitalism and its technologies.She received her BFA from St. John’s University in conjunction with the International Center for Photography in 2006. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2010. She has exhibited and performed at SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Southern Exposure as well as other venues internationally. She has participated in residencies at the BAVC in San Francisco, Arteles in Finland, Mills College Museum in Oakland, the ASU Museum’s International Artist residency in Phoenix which concluded with her solo exhibition, Where Thieves Go After Death. Most recently, she developed a new suite of performances, videos and sound compositions in Spain in an artist residency supported by Spanish embassy in Washington DC and the city of Málaga, Spain. Her work is part of Pier 24’s and The Whitney Museum’s permanent collections and was recently the subject of a First Look feature in Art in America.

The exhibition “somatic significations” it will be on view until Friday, February 23, 2018.  Pro Arts Gallery, Project Space and Studio Lab Residency facilities are located at 150 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland, CA. Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday: 1:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Exhibitions are FREE and Open to the Public.