Saelia Aparicio

RÍO & MEÑAKA presents at ARCOlisboa 2026 In the Blink of Collapse, a solo project by Saelia Aparicio (Ávila, 1982), specifically adapted for the fair from the eponymous project originally developed for the 36th Ljubljana Biennale (2025) and reconfigured through ceramics and drawing.

Comprising a large central sculpture alongside ceramic and drawing-based works, the installation addresses collective exhaustion and the ongoing experience of perpetual change. Saelia Aparicio (Ávila, Spain, 1982; lives and works in London) proposes a conception of time that challenges Western linearity. Her body of work unfolds as an intersectional mesh in which gender, race, class, age, colonial history, cultural rhythm, and technology converge, revealing how our perception of time and the body is continuously mediated by these structures of power. Through humor, tenderness, and repetition, she articulates a subtle form of hope—one that survives by adapting, softening, and refusing to look away.

The eyes of the central piece remain the project’s core axis—symbols of surveillance, fatigue, and emotional exposure. They evoke ancient idols, popular visual culture, and the instinctive pull of cuteness, while also recalling Gothic traditions of the uncanny and blind yet illuminated artificial intelligences.

Drawing, a central medium in her practice, allows Aparicio to focus on overlooked or repressed aspects of contemporary life: the obsession with bodily perfection, the fear of the abject, and the compulsion to exclude what threatens the symbolic order, as theorized by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror. The large-scale wall elements presented at the Biennale are transformed in the booth into ceramic stars and delicate drawings, shifting the work from an illusory architecture toward more intimate and tactile forms that distort and miniaturize reality.