Using weaving as both a conceptual and technical framework for her practice, and collaborating with the back-strap loom, Hellen Ascoli’s works deal with themes of knowledge production and displacement.

Ascoli also works as a translator, and understands this process both in terms of language and materiality. She states, “Certainly when my body becomes the means of translation the process also becomes sensorial. As a body that translates I perceive the pressures exerted on both sides of a conversation. These forces reveal power structures and certainly point to the things unsaid or uncaptured by language.”

In her new body of work titled ‘The World Upside Down’, presented concurrently in the Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry, and by extension at Art Basel Hong Kong, Ascoli alludes to the conflicting realities experienced personally having migrated to the United States from Guatemala and those she witnesses in other’s through her work as a translator. “For this project I use brick molds commonly found in Guatemala, to focus on the negative space of a unit as a mode of construction. Weaving then becomes the soft material embedded within - often not lasting as long as brick or stone - as a way to think about time, boundaries and the uses of technology used to transmit content and context.”

Through her innovative use of traditional materials and techniques, Ascoli invites viewers to reconsider the familiar and the foreign, the enduring and the ephemeral. Her work, poetic in nature, encourages broader discussions about the impacts of migration and the dynamics of power and expression within different cultural contexts, and the nuances that we often fail to register, translate, and fully understand.