Sofía Salazar Rosales

The Desire to Dance With Someone Who Is Not Here is the most recent exhibition by the Cuban-Ecuadorian artist Sofía Salazar Rosales, marking her second solo show at ChertLüdde.

For this occasion, the artist has crafted a series of sculptures specifically tailored for the exhibition space, delving into the intricate relationship between Sofia’s ancestral roots and her personal history. Once again, poetry takes center stage in her artistic practice, yet this time, dance serves as the pretext. How does one grapple with the longing to dance with someone who is absent? Can we replace the void with a tangible body, the silhouette with an idea, the object with its representation?

The Desire to Dance With Someone Who Is Not Here prompts the viewer to consider dancing with a stranger, embracing the uncertainty that ensues. Within the intimacy of two bodies intertwining freely in motion, lies the essence of this proposal. Sofía Salazar’s sculptures are conceived as dancing bodies—fluid, permeable, and poised in space, awaiting a partner.

Biography

Sofía Salazar Rosales (b. 1999, Ecuador) lives and works between Paris, France and Quito, Ecuador. She has recently completed a master’s degree at the School of Fine Arts (ENSBA Paris) in the ateliers of Tatiana Trouvé, Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with distinction from School of Fine Arts of Lyon (ENSBA Lyon) where she worked in the studios of Pauline Bastard and Niek Van de Steeg. This year, she was also selected for the two-year residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Salazar Rosales’s work develops from a sentence she wrote: “Hay cuerpos cansados por el viaje que buscan enraizarse” (There are bodies tired from the journey that seek to root). Her interest focuses on how objects have a potential to show social, political, and economic contexts, specifically linked to the displacement of humans, goods and other objects. She conceives her pieces as spaces of reconciliation to negotiate between the object, the material and their history throughout different contexts. Reconciling is also a constructive gesture in her work, which continuously transforms the objects with particular focus on their emotional effect. Salazar Rosales and her sculptures have a relationship of affection. The artist says: “We are contextual, but also sentimental.” In 2023, she was nominated for Premio illy Sustain Art Prize and Emerige-CPGA Prize and in 2022, she won the SARR Prize. Her first publication Hay cuerpos cansados por el viaje que buscan enraizarse (There are bodies tired from the journey seeking to root) was published by ChertLüdde on the occasion of her 2022 solo exhibition at Bungalow, Berlin and contains letters from her diary addressed to her sculptures.