Tramaine de Senna’s work bears witness to the artist’s intense relationship with materials, but also to the “migration of forms” between different popular or material cultures, excess, and also the symbolic violence and ‘hauntology’ of histories, both trans-cultural and personal. Working primarily with sculpture, de Senna’s works float aesthetically between exuberance and repulsion. In appropriating different forms, surface qualities and palettes, these works adopt a position of reflection towards society’s ability to produce prosaic pop culture in conjunction with its cannibalism of symbols and human subjectivities.

For her solo exhibition at M HKA, titled MASTERBLASTER, de Senna presents a series of new works alongside a key selection of existing sculptures. Together, this constellation of works form a broader investigation of transitionary aesthetics and selfhood. The forms that comprise de Senna’s works can be seen as acts of resistance to the contemporary demands for foregrounding one’s biography or one’s relations to established constituencies of identity, in favour of something much more ambiguous. Under the saccharin hues and textures, lye things more unresolved, mutable and non-representational. In this exhibition, these works requires us to reconcile our desires with the enigmatic nature of de Senna’s works.