Fina Ferrara
- Editor at Titan Contemporary Publishing
- Oct 2
- 3 min read
Fina Ferrara is a performance and video artist who is internationally acclaimed and recognized as being one of the finest performance artists in the world. She has performed and exhibited in major cities across the globe including London, Paris, New York, Venice, Rome, Madrid, and Mumbai, as well as in numerous cities across Latin America. Recent venues she has performed and exhibited her video art include Vedica Arts Studios and Gallery in Paris and Mumbai, International Video Art Festival and UNDOXX Performance Festival in New York, multiple exhibitions at Casa LaCuraduria in Monterrey, Mexico, Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello in Venice, ARTEXPO and Gallery Artifact in New York, and Contemporary Art International Fair in Paris.
With an extensive background in classical ballet, theatre, and contemporary dance, Fina Ferrara turned her attention to performance art and performance-based experimental video productions which are noted for her graceful, enigmatic, and even erratic movements seemingly similar to the prowlings of a feline. Conceptually, the performances and videos explain the tension and mania behind contemporary forms of relationships as well as provoking the viewer to explore modes outside of comfort and familiarity. The audio in the performances and videos are usually exploratorily digitized and release sounds ranging from serene to disturbing, often containing distorted rhythms which somewhat resemble a harmonic keyboard playing or shrieks of terror. Ranging from interactions with installations and sculptures to costumed props, Fina Ferrara dances, ritualistically summons, and even transforms herself into expressions and entities which invoke a variety of emotions relating to contemporary identity. Examples would be how society treats certain classes of people, such as women, or the contradictions of self-image, through her movements and behaviors expressing sorrow, suffering, and a longing for escape.
Often, the viewer will find the artist engaging in a ritualistic dance, as if she is calling upon spirits or behaving in a reaction to a tragedy. Through angular distortion of her wired-framed figure, Fina Ferrara distorts and contorts herself into forms which behave as visual expressions of emotional impulses. With energy and mania, Fina appears to incorporate her own style of contemporary dance followed by lunges and gasps with various parts of her limbs and facial expressions which convey a hyper-sense of yearning and desire. These performances are not meant to be decorative, glamorous, or remotely commercial in any capacity, but rather to provoke thoughtful discourse on specific concepts relating to the power of perception, illusion, interconnectivity as well as social distance.
Palimpsest (performance) (pictured above) entails both a live performance version as well as a video-based series of productions. Specifically, the performance entails a conceptual interpretation of a metamorphosis and reactions to relationships. Fina Ferrara emerges from a fiber-based costume-sculpture ‘coccoon’ and transforms into wearing an elaborate yet revealing gown outfit. With a serene digitized musical score, interruptions of screeching, screaming, laughing, and crying are belched out by the actor as if expressed by a powerful banshee. Emotions are manipulated by Fina pulling ‘noted’ pieces of fabric from her costume with a finale bathing herself in secretions of clay from a receptacle. The complex performance enhances the notions between identity, desire, and rebellion.
If the audience were to invest their time taking a deep dive into the extensive performance and video portfolio of Fina Ferrara, they will find themselves having chilling sensations which heightens awareness in regard to exploring peak investigative experimentations. In these mysterious works, the beauty and horror of Fina’s evocative motions and enhanced, stimulated dances seem to invoke a plane of consciousness from another realm or dimension. If embraced with an open mind, the viewer will find the performances to be not only thrilling but also passionate and hallucinogenic. Exemplifying a puristic essence of performance, the art of Fina Ferrara is meant to be savored in the moment, much like the concepts of breathing or mortality. The fluxus improvisation in her performances connect us with our sense of mindfulness and realities, engaging us to consider how motion and lucid interactions with environments, self, and props guide the audience to contemplate on our own finite existence and state of consciousness.
