Patricia Borges: Tropical Papers

Venue: 39 Keppel Rd, #03-10 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore 089065

TROPICAL PAPERS is a contemporary art exhibition by Brazilian visual artist and researcher, Patricia Borges. She explores the intersection between tropical climate and entropy in the poetics of image generation. The show, presented by INSTINC, will take place from March 21st to March 24th, 2024 at the artist-run space situated in Tanjong Pagar Distripark. This exhibition results from Patricia’s practical research conducted in Singapore through her participation in a three-months residency of INSTINC’s 23/24 Artist-in-Residence Program, and marks a new beginning for INSTINC as it showcases the first Artist-in-Residence exhibition since its relocation.

Rio de Janeiro-based visual artist Patricia Borges anchors her practice in an experimental approach to historical photographic processes, yielding unexpected results. Borges often incorporates substances derived from everyday urban life into cyanotype chemistry; in this case, cosmetics and cleaning products available at a local pharmacy or market. Through this approach, she shows audiences how deeply the history of art is interconnected with those of land and industry, and how these connections are evident in life today.

In TROPICAL PAPERS, Borges treats various types of papers of the Southeast Asian provenance with light-sensitive chemicals diluted in salts and tap water. These papers react to environmental luminosity, humidity, and temperature, generating images from a series of unpredictabilities—a challenge for those living in the era of controlling algorithms. Alchemical reactions produce different shades of blue; the iron in the formula oxidises to both green and orange, depending on the hosting ecosystem. Moreover, the images will continue to change over time, as they have not been fully developed and fixed; ferric oxides will react to ambient ultraviolet light (a spectrum invisible to the human eye). The image is alive and gently reminds us of our perishable nature.

To reflect historically on the evolution of photography from an artisanal medium in the pre-industrial world to its post-internet digital version, where everything seems equally transitory, the artist also creates hybrid images using AI technology and interspecies relations. Liquid environments, underwater life forms, and aquatic and marine transformations influence the aesthetics of the works. The artist seeks to capture the disruptions in technology and engineering that the Anthropocene imposes on the planet. Amid poetic landscapes, environmental violence, fictions, realities, oceans and computing intersect.