Exhibitions
The Weight of Desire: The Materialized Memory of Irene Carvajal Benavides
The artist Irene Carvajal Benavides presents her exhibition The Weight of Desire at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of Costa Rica (MADC), curated by Sofía Villena Araya and Imme Hüttmann, inaugurated on March 14, 2025 and open to the public until May 30.
Irene Carvajal Benavides is a Costa Rican-American artist based in San Francisco, California. Her work has been exhibited and recognized internationally, and she has participated in exhibitions and residencies in countries such as the United States, Japan, Mexico, Greece, and Costa Rica. She has also developed artistic installations in prominent spaces, including the San Jose Museum of Art in California.
At the heart of this exhibition lies a singular object: a weight inherited from her grandfather, forged and used in the 1950s at the old National Liquor Factory. This object, which was part of the mechanic's daily life and has remained in the family over time, becomes the focus of the artist's devotion. Through her work, Carvajal Benavides revisits this weight again and again, exploring the relationship between memory, connection, and desire, particularly after her migration from Costa Rica to the United States.
The artist's work confronts us with the fragility of memory, its fragmentary nature, and how fiction, reality, and the projection of our own identity intertwine in recollection. Her interest in functional objects—tools and everyday items with which we shape our work—becomes a conceptual axis: questioning the division between the useful and the artistic, challenging hierarchies that separate the manual from the creative.
The Weight of Desire invites us not only to contemplate an object laden with family history, but also to reflect on how everyday objects can carry memory, affection, and universal meanings that transcend their initial function. The exhibition thus becomes a dialogue between past and present, memory and art, intimacy and shared experience.
