Pollita Mijao is a multi-media artist and poet who works in painting, printmaking, video, performance, sculpture and installations.
Drawing on her history of involvement in the London underground punk scene, squatting and political activism, her work takes aim at the anthropocentrism of visual culture, with a style she describes as the ‘Anti-Sublime’. Merging her interests in the philosophy of objects, anthropology, and pre-theistic animist beliefs, with visions of a not-too-distant dystopian future, Pollita has created a series of works under the title of ‘Zen for the Apocalypse’.
Rather than focussing on any one medium, Pollita sees her work as a sort of theatrical set design – creating backdrops or environments for her various performance characters to exist within. Much of her visual work exists in conversation with her written work and poetry, and has found a natural home in video art.
The ethos of DIY culture is the central tenet to all the works she creates. The driving ideology being that in a society that primes us to consume, the act of making is an act of resistance. Believing that the means are inextricable from the ends and that self-sufficiency in making offers an escape from the culture of ‘product’ and ‘consumption’.
From the punk scene, she has brought into her practice a joy of theatrics, showmanship, and love of all things carnivalesque and grotesque.
Pollita has exhibited and performed at various underground and squatted art exhibitions over the years, including Temporary Autonomous Arts. She exhibited a selection of ‘anti-speciesist’ artworks at the Liberation Arts Festival held at The Paintworks in Bristol 2019. She has performed as a spoken word artist and published written work under the pen name of The Horny Handed Daughter of Toil.
“Mijao’s work is full of revolutionary fervour, aimed not just toward political paradigms, but anthropocentrism, the post-enlightenment cultural hangover, and numerous inter-relating pathological concerns.” - Exploding Appendix
