The kiss group of 8, 2012

Maria Jose Arjona  

María José Arjona (b.1973 in Santa Fe de Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in her native Bogota.

The Kiss was a self-taken photograph and was part of her solo exhibition in New York at the Art Space Location One, in 2012. The Kiss maps a system uniting two bodies. It is a gesture magnified by the use of sound emerging from the action of kissing and intensified by the working presence of the performer's body.

“The Kiss" (is a long durational performance), a breathing system where the performer's body becomes the intersection enabling the entire organism to work, reveals the intricate rhythm between lungs, fluids, and muscles while kissing. The body is the kiss: the plane of action created by it. This intersecting plane finds its translation into sound via the repetitive action of inflating and deflating two huge latex balloons."

Maria José Arjona is a performance artist focused on affirming the body through long durational exercises addressing process, time, memory and power. Her performances have been exhibited in museums and galleries in South America, Europe, China, and the United States and have been reviewed by Art Nexus, Arte Al Dia, The New York Times, The Guardian (UK), Whitewall Magazine, The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and many others. She participated as a re-performer at Marina Abramovic's retrospective at The Museum Of Modern Art in New York and started touring with her own work at The Madre Museum in Naples (Italy) as part of the program “Corpus, Arte In Azione". The itineration of this project includes locations in Bologna (Italy), Bergen and Oslo (Norway), New York (US), Vienna (Austria) and will end in 2010 in Colombia as part of the National Salon sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia.

Arjona will have a solo exhibition in 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota.

Find this artist and many more in our collection of works from the dance photography movement.