Air of Stockholm, Air of Banja Luka, Air of Mexico – despite its tender age, Judi Werthein’s work “Cosa” has already travelled from China to Scandinavia and via the Balkans to Mexico City, a behaviour symptomatic for this inflatable, nondescript “thing”. In each place, the large body is charged with local air and meaning, while retaining its great secret – an animal never reveals what it has seen, isn’t that so?
In several of her works, Judi Werthein has elaborated on topics such as social and political taboos, mechanisms of repression and suppression, like in her film “Secure Paradise” (2008), in which the artist visits a German community who fled Europe after the second World War and formed an isolated enclave in Chile.
“Cosa” is a large, green object that seems to fit into every exhibition space and, at the same time, to none. It settles, breathes and lives again, but seems to resist being measured and weighed. As viewers we move around the enormous, apparently formless, volume in futile attempts to fathom its form, both visually and conceptually – is there an elephant in the living room? Judi Werthein’s work brings together the image of the elephant as the unspeakable truth and as a metaphor for how contemporary global economy has lost all sense of proportion, or, as the artist puts it: “Most of the things, or ‘Cosas’, surrounding us in our daily life are formed and shaped by China. Chinese insertion in the new global economy becoming ‘the’ outsourcing manufacturing force (for America), has created a shock that American capitalism never contemplated in its original plan, in which all the American and most of the European industry cannot compete in quality/price/time/amounts of production, positioning China as main key player within the global economy not to mention the mass of wealth that is becoming the ‘factory’ (cause they produce but not consume the goods they manufacture) of the world brought to China.”
Cecilia Widenheim
Director Iaspis
