STATEMENT:
The work of María Llopis crosses through a variety of forms and media, such as photography, video and live art performance. She develops her own alternative vision of sexual identity and gender, always based on a strong feminist political position. Llopis deconstructs the sexual subject of feminism in order to develop a discourse that is closer to practices around pro-sex feminism or transfeminism.
In her work, Llopis deals with orgasm and violence, with the sexuality of older women, with the performativity of our gender, with sexual violence, with virtual sex, with alternative maternities, with orgasmic childbirth. But above all, Maria Llopis situates sexuality/intimacy as a powerful force of creation and as a necessary political weapon for questioning the society we live in.
BIO:
María Llopis, Valencia 1975.
Maria Llopis has a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Valencia (1998) and Master in Audiovisual Animation from Unviersitat Autonoma de Barcelona (2000).
Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions and video programs, including Artivistic, Montreal (2009), The Art and Politics of Netporn, Amsterdam (2006), Volte Gallery in Bombay (2010) and the Festival Panorama in Rio de Janeiro (2011).
In the course of her professional career she has imparted many workshops on art and feminism at art centres like Hangar and Arteleku in Spain, the City of Women Festival in Ljubljana (2007) and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2008).
From 2003 to 2007 she was an active part of the multidisciplinary collective «Girlswholikeporno», which carried out projects internationally, including an audiovisual performance presented at Sónar, Barcelona’s International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art (2004).
She has also imparted lectures on new representations of sexuality in art at several spanish universities, at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2010), and at the Post Porn Politics Symposium in Berlin (2006). Her book El posporno era eso was published by Melusina (Barcelona) in 2010.
María Llopis (Valencia, 1975) is an artist, activist, feminist, queer, post-pornographer with a fetish for riding bicycles – always putting the fun between her legs. She lives in Spain but is moving to the Andaman Islands to make a live, life performance of bleeding freely and unplugged in nature.
She has always had difficulties reaching an orgasm. Her 1st orgasm took place when she was 25 with her Swiss boyfriend Benjamin Stadler. He is very honoured. But She never reached an orgasm by herself except now, we can say – thru the journey of writing her book – once upon a time post porn or literally translated, post-porn was like that – she has finally been successful to come.
(María Llopis, introduced by indian artist Tejal Shah in Gallery Volte, Mumbai 2010)