{"id":484465,"date":"2026-06-18T23:17:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T23:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/484465\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T23:17:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T23:17:20","slug":"ana-maria-devis-what-the-body-leaves-behind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/484465\/","title":{"rendered":"Ana Mar\u00eda Devis: What the Body Leaves Behind"},"content":{"rendered":"

The artist\u2019s beds of rotting matter and jars of decay question how \u2013 and what \u2013 we value <\/p>\n

\u2018Bed rotting\u2019 can be understood as voluntarily retreating to bed for hours at a time while awake, engaging in activities such as doomscrolling, streaming, eating and gaming. Contemporary art appears increasingly captivated by what the phenomenon reveals about our current cultural mood: for example, it\u2019s a concept that manifests in works like Qualeasha Wood\u2019s Attention Economy (2025) and Aphex Redditor\u2019s viral BedRot (2026), both durational performances examining states of digital exhaustion. Colombian Ana Mar\u00eda Devis, meanwhile, takes the term in a more empirical sense, zooming inwards instead of out, viewing decay not as a state of decline, but as an opportunity for new lifeforms to emerge. A valid excuse for an extra hour or two under the covers, one might argue.<\/p>\n

Raised in Bogot\u00e1 and trained in scenography while living briefly in Brazil, Devis is an artist whose three-decade-long career has unfolded mostly within local contexts and regional galleries. Speaking to me from her hometown, she tells me she is \u201cinterested in working from that threshold where the intimate and the environmental meet, where the domestic ceases to be a contained space and reveals itself as a living ecosystem\u201d, making sense of invisible networks such as bacteria. It is a bacteria-infested bed, left to decompose after a year of human absence, that forms the centrepiece of her first solo institutional exhibition \u2013 From One Life Into Another, on show at the Bogot\u00e1 Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO) \u2013 informing a series of two installations, one videowork and a drawing composed of five panels, as well as several research photographs.<\/p>\n

\"\"Research photograph for From One Life Into Another, 2025. Photo: Lisa Palomino. \u00a9 Bogot\u00e1 Modern Art Museum<\/p>\n

The artist describes the initial encounter with the bed as \u201calmost unbearable\u201d. It emerged after the death of a friend\u2019s father, whose sixth-floor apartment remained locked and abandoned for months while exposed to a water leak, activating a slow but sure process of decay. When Devis and her friend finally entered the space after learning of the issue, decked out in masks and gloves to protect themselves from potential health risks, what they found was shocking. \u201cThe air was dense, saturated with a pungent, almost sweet and decomposing smell, something that could be felt in the body as much as seen,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe bed, in the main room, had become an epicentre. Its deep reds and oranges were produced by yeasts and proteins that, drawn to fat, had colonised the surface. It was impossible not to recognise the imprints of the bodies that had once inhabited it: persistent, almost spectral traces that made an absent presence visible.\u201d<\/p>\n

It makes one uneasy to imagine these invisible microforms alive in our homes, not least where we sleep \u2013 those warm, sacred spaces of safety and intimacy. Perhaps that kneejerk discomfort is one of the reasons why Devis chose to preserve the bed, seeing its potential in artworks, rather than disposing of it at once. She began to document the scene, photographing textures and forms up close, and worked with a mycologist, Tatiana Sanju\u00e1n, to sterilise material for further work, placing the sheets in an autoclave and applying 8.34 bar of pressure, at a temperature of 100C, before transferring them under a germicidal ultraviolet light for 24 hours. The procedure was hazardous. One research photograph, displayed in the exhibition, shows white vinyl-gloved hands pulling back a striped bedsheet to reveal a colony of spores, overlapping and fading in shades of rust. Delicate dark-brown dots gather in groups, collating into new forms that look harsh and menacing. Another image closes in on the wicker basket on the bedside table \u2013 at second glance, furry with white mould; another zooms in on a specific patch of decay and its veinlike growth; a trick of the eye.<\/p>\n

\"\"Research photograph for From One Life Into Another, 2025. Photo: Lisa Palomino. \u00a9 Bogot\u00e1 Modern Art Museum<\/p>\n

Learning how particular forms and colours signified different metabolic processes, Devis and Sanju\u00e1n retained certain cultures in the laboratory to extract pigments, later used to dye threads that Devis stitched over and into fabric transfers of the photographs. \u201cThe image ceased to be immediate and entered a manual, almost meditative process,\u201d she says, explaining she found the reworking essential to her understanding of the protein breakdowns resulting in the dramatic visual effects at play. \u201cThrough repetition, it is possible to access forms of knowledge that are not linear or fully visible, but that manifest themselves through matter. The stitch began to operate in a way analogous to the processes of growth and expansion I had observed in the microorganisms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in the gallery, a single bedsheet hangs from the ceiling like a sail. Harsh tears in the most dense, rotting sections allow light to filter through from a window above, leaving jagged shadows on the tiled floor. Elsewhere, another sheet, this one embroidered, is displayed flat on a glass table. The threadwork is at times delicate, adorned with lines of tiny beads and knitted knots; at others dense and lurching, conjoining together from the surface to create odd, unidentified three-dimensional creatures, as if mirroring how fungal growth might have continued to proliferate had the scene been left unchecked. There\u2019s a playfulness to this display, but, as the forms spawn seemingly at random, clutching to each other or spiralling into new shapes, also a sense that control could be lost at any moment \u2013\u2002much like the \u2018bed\u2019 rot we engage with while on our phones, or any other rot for that matter. Under the table, a lightbox mirror reflects the patterns of decay as loose threads hang down from above, as though roots: the energy channels feeding the chaos on the surface.<\/p>\n

\"\"Research photograph for From One Life Into Another, 2025. Photo: Lisa Palomino. \u00a9 Bogot\u00e1 Modern Art Museum<\/p>\n

You first encounter the bed at the entrance to the museum\u2019s lower ground floor gallery, where the exhibition takes place. Here, a television screen mounted to the wall shows a video in which a white sheet, adorned with a print of the photograph of the rotted bed, hangs from the branches of a saman tree. It blows gently in the wind as nonchalant bearded iguanas graze below, waddling around and chewing on grass; a tropical landscape stretches out far behind, the heightened saturation of the landscape vivid, the grass dewy and the air presumably thick with humidity. This suggestion of moisture brings the two opposing scenes together \u2013 the bedroom, closed, stifling with damp and potentially hazardous bacteria, and the landscape, open and safe (the exhibition text revealing that it is home to the artist\u2019s mother), and somewhere Devis has frequently integrated into her works \u2013 uniting them, ultimately, with evidence of life.<\/p>\n

The iguanas feature elsewhere in Devis\u2019s MAMBO show, where displays of collected human hair, used makeup wipes and residues of reptile skin \u2013 signifiers of human and nonhuman bodily waste \u2013 are presented in glass jars, almost like a pick-and-mix sweet shop or a biological specimen collection. Working with a Frankenstein-esque logic, Devis sews the objects together, reimagining them as fantasy buglike creatures, displayed on a table with magnifying glasses and entomology glassware, and a towering treelike form: peculiar at first glance, grotesque at the next. Devis attributes part of her affinity for collecting odd objects to her father, an engineer by trade, who decided to devote himself to painting at the age of thirty-five. \u201cHe was a tireless collector, an accumulator of fragments and remnants,\u201d Devis says. \u201cI was fascinated in seeing how everything he gathered \u2013 what for others might seem like waste \u2013 would later find another life in his painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says her father\u2019s way of seeing and transforming matter sharpened her own practice, stemming from an interest in \u201cwhat the body, both human and nonhuman, leaves behind and [that which] loses value once it is separated from it\u201d. Further elaborating, she says: \u201cI am interested in thinking of these materials not as waste, but as matter charged with memory, time and presence\u2026 Many come from a close environment: my mother, my daughters, friends, people who are part of my life, but also from other bodies and ecosystems. The hair, for instance, is not only mine, but that of others who, by donating it, become part of what I call a \u2018collective of affects\u2019.\u201d In that, they become a record of shared feminine rituals: clumps of shed strands left behind in a hairbrush; dried wet-wipes smeared with what appears to be rouge lipstick and black mascara. \u201cI am interested in the ambivalence they hold,\u201d Devis says. \u201cThey are linked to ideals of beauty, to routines of constructing appearance; but the moment they are discarded, they become something uncomfortable, even repulsive. That transition, from the desirable to the abject, is a threshold I am interested in inhabiting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"From the series From One Life Into Another (detail), 2025, sublimated fabric and handmade embroidery, dimensions variable. Photo: Lisa Palomino. \u00a9 Bogot\u00e1 Modern Art Museum<\/p>\n

In MAMBO\u2019s upstairs gallery, housing objects from the gallery\u2019s permanent collection, Elsa Gramcko\u2019s Broken Surface (1963) is displayed, a small painting on wood in various shades of teal, centred around a rectangle. Like Devis, Gramcko used waste and found materials in her work, often playing with the limits of material by allowing decomposition or decay, such as rust, to disrupt industrial surfaces while acknowledging the ongoing passage of time. Gramcko was one of the Venezuelan Informalists, who critiqued the rapid modernisation taking place in Venezuela during the 1950s and often used tactics of shock to make a statement (Carlos Contramaestre\u2019s 1962 Homage to Necrophilia exhibition, for instance, incorporated animal remains and was shut down by the Ministry of Health within days). Yet, despite the reactions of repulsion provoked by From One Life Into Another, and the potential biological hazards that once accompanied it, Devis tells me that transgression was never her intention. Rather, she sees her practice as process-led: \u201cI am interested in understanding how the transformations [of materials] operate, rather than using them as a disruptive gesture in itself,\u201d she notes, a continuity that she believes can \u201cunsettle our habitual ways of perceiving and understanding the world\u201d.<\/p>\n

When left unchecked for too long, anything alive can begin to rot. It will transform not only itself, but the spaces and atmosphere around it, recycling nutrients into that environment to fuel new growth. Decay, in other words, is essential to life.<\/p>\n

Ana Maria Devis\u2019s exhibition From One Life Into Another. Affective Thresholds and Astonishing Matters is on show at MAMBO, Bogot\u00e1, through 26 June<\/a><\/p>\n

From the Summer 2026 issue of\u00a0ArtReview\u00a0\u2013\u00a0get your copy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Chiara Wilkinson<\/a>Features<\/a>June 18, 2026ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The artist\u2019s beds of rotting matter and jars of decay question how \u2013 and what \u2013 we value…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-484465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}