MABEL POBLET PUJOL
Artist Statement
Mabel Poblet describes the strangeness and restlessness of the world (while, below, the void), and looks deep, inward, sometimes as if from dreams, wondering in the complexity of her creations about the very act of seeing, about a mysterious spirit wandering in space, and so the corpus of her work is also an experience of thought. Poblet thus creates, from that painful wandering populated by images, with intense emotions, without distraction, rejecting conventional interpretations of the world, presenting her work almost as a serial-like corpus, a sort of complex diary of emotions that seems to have been conceived from a numinous territory of reserve.
Mabel Poblet (b. 1986, Cienfuegos, Cuba) lives and works between Cuba and Madrid. Her multimedia practice explores themes of identity, mobility, and belonging. Poblet graduated from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in 2007 and later earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of the Arts (ISA), in 2012. In 2008, she participated in the workshops of the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, organized and directed by Tania Bruguera.
Poblet’s work is eclectic and consists of installations, photography, mixed media, kinetic works and is directly related to her life experience. Although deeply personal, it is free of sentimentality. Poblet forcefully invites the viewer to not only explore her life, but to embark on a journey of their own.
The artist explores the passage of time, the fragmentation of memory and the journey of life. For her works, she folds hundreds of copies of personal photographs into origami structures, which together create a new complex, multidirectional, abstracted and fractured image. Poblet draws the motifs for her idiosyncratic works from her childhood memories in Cuba and her photographic travel diaries, self-portraits and photographs of the ocean.
She exhibited in the Cuban pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (Italy) in 2017 and has participated in exhibitions at the Ludwig Forum Aachen (Germany), the Tampa Museum (USA), Chanel Nexus Hall (Tokyo Japan), the MAC – Museo Arte Contemporáneo, Lima (Peru), the Harm Museum of Art at the University of Florida (USA) and the Havana Biennial (Cuba), among many others.
