Artist: Cõvco
Exhibition title: FLY HIGH
Venue: Cordova, Barcelona, Spain
Date: June 8 – September 3, 2022
Photography: Roberto Ruiz, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Cordova
‘Atlantic spirits selling their royal oats for fresh lamb to B/W sheep.
I see them calling for more life, baffled by the idea of agua being all our friend.’
For the artist´s first solo presentation in Spain FLY HIGH, Cõvco presents a new site-specific immersive installation. The exhibition continues a material and conceptual investigation initiated with a performance called Nexus in Paradise: A season of L´s originally developed for Thunder and Light, a public program about faith and God curated by Cordova’s director Cory John Scozzari that took place in March of 2022 at La Casa Encendida. In the Barcelona chapter the audience is drawn into an immersive world of large-scale fabric pieces and paintings, whose figurative and expressive passages simultaneously invoke sensations of panic and tribulation as well as divinity and ecstasy. Viewers are taken on a pilgrimage with Cõvco where she asks some difficult questions about belief, the sublime and the passage from life into death. In this version there is a special tribute paid to the oceanic journey of migrants who come to Europe from Africa and how through this voyage they are converted into angels; both those who arrive and those who remain at sea.
Cõvco is a London-based artist whose interdisciplinary language translates into performance art, poetry, sound production and visual art. She works through ritual and catharsis and often culls from epic biblical narratives and her own personal experiences of navigating the complexities of life and faith. Her work has been shown at South London Gallery, Stedelijk Museum, Camden Arts Centre and La Casa Encendida among others.
