Marina Berio, “Funky Swimming 1,1,1 (4)”, 2021
Marina Berio, “Funky Swimming 1,1,1 (4)”, 2021
Funky swimming is a powerful Kundalini meditation I have been doing to eliminate brain fatigue, balance the right and left hemispheres of my brain, heal my relationship to my live/work studio, and change fear into bravery and love. After doing it regularly for several weeks, I started dipping my hands in charcoal and tracing the circles on the wall instead of in the air.
I have been surprised to see that the two sides of the analemma are not at all symmetrical: the left seems more down to earth, solid, dependably circular, and dark – and the right seems to float a little higher, with a more irregular shape and much lighter tone. I have wondered if the traces of movement on the wall express a difference in the relative strengths of my arms, a cerebral imbalance, or a dualism in my personality.
Marina Berio is a visual artist from New York who works with drawings, photography, and video to convey aspects of visual experience that are intimate and visceral. She has printed family pictures with her own blood and rendered 35mm photographic negatives as large-scale charcoal drawings. A more recent project, shot on the walls of her studio, expresses the interrelationship between the nested realities of mental space, the creative process, the internal topography of the body, and the studio itself.
Berio has been awarded grants by the Guggenheim and the Pollock/Krasner Foundations – and has taken part in various residencies including the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Millay. Her most recent exhibitions have been at Baxter Street at CCNY in New York; Galerie Miranda in Paris; OFF Triennale in Hamburg; and Shiro Oni Studio in Japan.
Berio teaches at the International Center of Photography, Penumbra Foundation, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), all in New York – and is a member of PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), the activist group founded by Nan Goldin to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in creating the opioid crisis.