Beatriz Cortez is an artist and scholar who grew up during the war in El Salvador and subsequently migrated to Los Angeles. A central goal of her work is making multiple temporalities visible within our shared space of the present. Stela XX (Absence) (2024), a monolithic steel sculpture, follows the migration of particles from the Ilopango Tierra Blanca Joven super-eruption in the mid-fifth century CE. As rock and magma blasted into the stratosphere, it darkened the sun and was carried by atmospheric currents to fall across the globe, resulting in an extended winter that affected the ancient Maya civilisation and continents beyond. The traces of the volcano are present both near and far: the caldera, or deep depression in the earth, left in the volcano’s wake subsequently filled with water to become Lake Ilopango, while particles of its ash can still be found deep in Arctic ice. Stela XX’s contoured lines are inspired by photographs and drawings of premodern Maya monoliths now housed in museum collections, which were deliberately broken to extract them from their sacred sites. Its undulating steel surface is welded with glyphs that chart this loss and mark their absences.
This is the first time the work of Beatriz Cortez is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Vic Brook
