Gabriella Torres Ferrer at Embajada

Artist: Gabriella Torres Ferrer

Exhibition title: notes on power

Venue: Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Date: February 4 – April 8, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Embajada, San Juan

Gabriella Torres Ferrer presents a site-specific installation, ‘notes on power,’ as part of the ongoing series Mine Your Own Business in which everyday objects of consumption are arranged as still lifes implanted with microcomputers. Displaying diverse data scraped from the internet such as personal data of the artist, real time market values, or cryptocurrency mining, the series critiques the current digital environment, questioning Puerto Rico’s post-hurricane utopian/speculative wave of crypto businesses that seem to take advantage of places in crisis.

Most recently Torres-Ferrer utilizes tropical fruit to create living sculptures. Made with pineapples, plantains, coconuts, or sugar cane, the works decay in real time along live data fluctuations that cross-examine global fintech dreams of deregulated empowerment and sovereignty. Inspired by the classical still-life work of Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller who has been described as a “visual bridge between the Old World and the New World,” Torres-Ferrer plays with historical context to suggest the digital environment’s relationship as part of a continuum of capitalist-colonial entanglements.

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer (b. 1987 Arecibo, Puerto Rico) is a multimedia artist and researcher whose practice considers futurability, new digital epistemologies and subverts hegemonic narratives; power dynamics and means of exchange in a globalized networked society. Torres-Ferrer’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including with Occupy Museum’s 2017 participation at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), El Museo del Barrio (New York) and online at The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale. In 2020 Torres-Ferrer received the CERN’s (Genève) guest artist prize and won the Akademie Schloss Solitude international Artist- in-Residence fellowship around the topic “Mutations” (Stuttgart). In 2021 Torres-Ferrer was featured in a 3-person exhibition at the Hessel Museum at CCS Bard curated by Isabella Achenbach. Torres-Ferrer is currently included in the group exhibition at The Whitney Museum, no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria curated by Marcella Guerrero.

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, ‘notes on power’ (installation view), 2023

Gabriella Torres Ferrer, (Untitled) Still alive…, 2023, Coconuts, pineapple, manzano bananas, sugar cane, various objects, live data displays., 60 x 24 x 32 in.