Some flowers and dictators
Mariana Bunimov

Mariana Bunimov was born in Venezuela in 1972. Fatefully, images of Chavez and Maduro were omnipresent in her life, shaping her understanding of how a man who holds all the power can destroy a country.

It was from this analytical material that she began her series of puppet characters, hybrids between military men and politicians who ultimately become puppets or clowns.

This type of character seems to be endlessly reproduced throughout the world, whether on the extreme left or right. This is what attracted Mariana Bunimov to the image and myth of the Minotaur: a monster who feeds on humans, on fresh meat, insatiable, protected in a labyrinth which today is that of information and over-information.

How do we defeat him, how do we defeat the beast, what will be our Ariadne's thread ? Mariana Bunimov believes that, as the title of one of the paintings says, people move forward collectively. Theseus, moreover, proposes to kill the Minotaur to stop the sacrifice of the common people who feed him, and meets Ariadne, who helps him kill the beast by giving him a thread to follow. This is collaboration, mutual aid. On the one hand, there's the individual, the egocentric dictator, and on the other the community trying to fight him. We find these themes in the works in this exhibition such as white flags for peace, children playing in military camouflage.

Finally, there are telephones, also presented as dictators insofar as they alienate us in order to dominate us. This is what Mariana Bunimov calls the “telephone residential unit in her ear”, the eponymous expression of one of the paintings in the exhibition. HLM téléphonique, Le Corbusier in technology: we live, crushed by the computer system, by the technological machine.

But there are flowers too. There's hope and beauty. As in life.