WYNNIE MYNERVA: BARCELONA
Wynnie Mynerva (Lima, Peru, 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work draws on personal experiences of violence related to race, gender, and sexuality. Their practice, which includes painting, performance, video, and objects, challenges traditional views on the bodily aspect of human experience, particularly how disciplines like history, science, philosophy, and religion have been built on cis-heteropatriarchal, white, colonial, and hegemonic norms.
As a non-binary individual born and raised in Villa El Salvador, a district near Lima marked by social and economic struggles, crime, and both sexual and labour exploitation, Mynerva's work is shaped by collective traumas of the Global South and the reality of living with a chronic illness. They use these difficult experiences to envision "a future of hope", creating elusive bodies in their work that exist beyond binary terms like "man and woman" or "sick and healthy". This approach opens up broader conversations and deeper questions that challenge the foundations of universalist postulates from the Enlightenment and colonial modernity.
The new exhibition project at Mayoral, curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio and titled “The Sweet Nectar of Your Blood”, focuses on the living tissue that circulates in our bodies—made up of liquids and cells—. Starting from blood, Mynerva explores themes related to the Christian tradition of blood purity, influenced by colonial inquisitions, while also addressing notions of infection as a new stage of blood and its social implications, from which to look at the present—both from the colonial legacy and from the legacy of the infected body. This perspective allows Mynerva to reflect on their own experience based on their own blood, as a non-binary, colonised-migrant body and as a body whose blood is infected with hiv/aids.
The exhibition features a large installation of mural canvases that resemble informal living spaces, reminiscent of the early settlements in Villa El Salvador—from where the artist originates—from the late 1960s and early 1970s. These works show the sandy landscape where orgies of desire connect with past reed monuments, which in the Peruvian context are used as altars for religious celebrations or for fireworks. Their intention is to juxtapose the past remnants of this architectural and patrimonial landscape with the condition of the infected body and the artist's experiences. Mynerva incorporates pre-colonial iconography, such as the Huaca del Templo del Sol, overlaying it with their own and their friends' experiences as non-normative, seropositive bodies, for whom the infection has allowed the world to be seen through other eyes. These bodies, like colonised and infected erupting mountain bodies, continue to undergo the violence produced by racism, classism and colonial epistemic sexism.
Ultimately, Mynerva's work for this exhibition marks a turning point in their career, intertwining coloniality and infection through paintings, performances, and videos of non-normative seropositive bodies. Their powerful work serves as a mechanism for emancipation and revenge, subverting mythology and transforming it into a speculative narrative. In an irreverent manner, religious colonial symbols are present yet absent—erased or subverted—as seen in the Cruz del Camino de los Andes on the canvases, or the religious garments in Mynerva’s performance with their friend Alexis, a trans seropositive migrant from Peru in Barcelona. Together, in their performance for the opening, they will showcase the traces of exploitation and infection while celebrating their identities and honouring the legacy of previous artists from the Global South who have engaged with hiv/aids, such as the Chileans Yeguas del Apocalipsis and the Peruvians Giuseppe Campuzano and Germán Machuca.
