Gihan Tubbeh Peru, b. 1984
Literature
De Tiempo en Tiempo un Volcán Estalla (From Time to Time a Volcano Explodes)
De Tiempo en Tiempo un Volcán Estalla suggests an allegorical journey to the feminine condition within the universe through a poetic construction by associating the insignia of nature with the human and animal kingdom. Through a metaphorical elaboration, the images attempt to elevate the feminine condition of the earth as nucleus of fertility and generation of life, without ceasing to confront us with its power of destruction. Nature speaks as an eruption of being, reminiscing heritage where ancestors, archetypes and arcana meet again.
Inherent to nature and imprinted in the landscape, violence is a force before all, a vehicle between death and new life. A mythical terrain that reminds us, that nature acts as a mother who creates everything and destroys everything.
While nature’s dichotomies spread between creation and destruction, the works attempt to awaken to a planetary vision -enhanced by the sense of common destiny- of the psychic landscape and emotional topography in which we are submerged; a transformation of the physical into the psychological.
Curated text by: Daniele Queiroz
Gihan Tubbeh is a Peruvian artist who offers us signs and enigmas. Her images earned her early awards, but this didn’t intimidate her to continue experimenting within the photographic language, metamorphosing herself and her work, in search of a vocabulary that was closer to poetry and music than to visual references.
Her first book, “De tiempo en tiempo un volcán estalla”, released in 2019, is itself a sphinx: decipher me or I’ll devour you. There is no explicit narrative or even an attempt to convince us of something: the book presents itself as a possibility of desire, violence, eroticism and ancestry, all at once - or in no time. Here, we’re talking about another temporal dimension, where you need to be aware: at any moment a volcano can explode and destroy everything. But the earth devastated by volcanoes ends up also being the most fertile.
Gihan searches - and supplies us - some clues when she herself follows the trail of mythological figures, animals or lonely landscapes, such as Iceland. God is Icelandic, she says. These clues outline for us a scenario full of ancestry: what makes us up, what comes from immemorial times. A stone, the egg that each month is destroyed in blood, the heavenly space, a white-eyed falcon, as old as time. The book - and its work - is an invitation to enter this mythical terrain, where nature acts as a mother who creates everything and destroys everything. Persephone and Hera, cyclically in their descent to hell and ascent to build spring again.
Gihan Tubbeh invites us on this cyclical walk, as dangerous as it is exciting. Decipher me or I’ll devour you.