MAVI is a series of pieces that consist in extracting photographs from the vast archives of over a million portraits of an old photographic studio located in the centre of Lima, Peru and serializing it’s content under diverse parameters, always choosing pictures between the last 40 years (1968 – 2008) two dates both as symbolic as arbitrary.
Therefore, in MAVI : Barbudo (Bearded) the most performative of the series, we find 39 portraits of bearded men, all taken on October 6, that in some way, might be Yoshua Okón himself. The selection starts in 1970 (birth year of the artist) and ends on the 6th of October 2008, his birthday and date of his MAVI portrait.
For MAVI : María Quispe, Okón assembles 130 different women, with the same name (a common name that reveals and reflects a certain migrating and rural presence in Lima) : all the María Quispe’s photographed in the MAVI studio from 1968 until 2008.
In MAVI : Before and After, the artist selects and appropriates negatives of portraits taken of the same person with and without glasses (26 in the complete archive). This duplication of a duplication sometimes results comical, at times disturbing and it underlines the strange similarity and intriguing difference that we observe in portraits throughout history.
