Two embroideries as a starting point. In them, two Yiddish words intertwine enigmatically. Mishiguene: a deranged or crazy person. Chutzpah: a blend of audacity, confidence, and shamelessness that in Hebrew also carries a strong sense of disapproval or condemnation. Yet even though these two inscriptions act as semantic poles, the true language of this body of work is above all symbolic.
MISHIGUENE moves gracefully between the cheekiness of comic art (in Peru, “chiste”) and biblical iconography. There are serpents, books shared in secret, maps (or are they wounds?), and women navigating between war and fashion as if these were overlapping subjects in a gathering of friends where everyone speaks at once. The protagonists cry even as they wear smiles and magazine-cutout grimaces, brandish banners that say nothing, or hold scissors and flails that reveal a goat’s leg.
Eroticism runs through everything as both provocation and mirror of power. Sex toys, high heels, and dybbuks—in Jewish folklore, malevolent spirits capable of possessing other beings—coexist with UZI submachine guns, handbags, and slogans rendered in embroidery, watercolor, silkscreen, and drawing. Yet the vigor of MISHIGUENE becomes more ambiguous as it naturally transitions into the realm of the unconscious and the dreamlike. Neurotic obsessions with childhood, school, and community dissolve amid confusion and irony. Thus, the pressure to fit in—and the passion with which one resists—end up weaving a powerful and mocking narrative about surveillance, paranoia, rebellion, and freedom.
In MISHIGUENE, Leslie Spak does not point fingers: she invites us to look—and to look at ourselves—with rage and humor through a disjointed window, like someone who recognizes themselves in madness.
Verónica Klingenberger
