Yuvinka Medina: By incorporating gifted, borrowed, and rented objects from family and friends, your work challenges conventional ideas of ownership. How do you see community-based exchange as a form of resilience, and how does it influence your artistic process?

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino: I am very occupied with concepts of objecthood and property and how, with my work, I am able to creatively elaborate and complexify them. The dynamics of object exchange (whether with family, friends, or even the institution) that constitute many of my works until now bring into my practice the possibility of incorporating different intentions and perspectives around these items. This means that my artistic input is in negotiation with one of the others, which definitely informs, rather than shapes, my creative process – sometimes more intentionally (when I, for example, ask my mother to choose a color for us to paint the ceiling of the exhibition space) and other times consequently when my father, myself and an artistic organization discuss which object could we rent from him, for how much, and how long.

Biography

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino (b. 1989, Buritizeiro) based in Germany and Brazil. They graduated from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig in 2023. Celestino has had solo exhibitions at BPA, Cologne (2022); GUA VA, Brasilia (2021); and Goswell Road, Paris. Group exhibitions includes ZSenne, Brussels (2024); Castignoli, Milan (2024); Kunsthall Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2024); and Galerie Molitor, Berlin (2023).

Image: Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, RENTAL/FATHER, 2023. Simian, Copenhagen. Photo: GRAYSC