calendario eventi  :: 

X

8/4/2013

Miguel Angel Rios and Carlos Motta

Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico City

The Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros aims to approach the political problem in art through two divergent strategies from different generations: Miguel Ángel Rios (originally from Argentina and living between New York and Mexico City) and Carlos Motta, an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in New York City.

Miguel Ángel Ríos
Through the Frontier

Through the Frontier comprises a new video by Miguel Ángel Ríos finished in 2012, and a series of drawings made during the research and production phases of the piece. It deals with specific issues such as, an examining of the documentary character as a core idea, a drift toward rural peripheral areas, the giving up of leisure/play as a protagonist, as well as, stressing the distance between the institution of art and the Latin American heartland.

Considered one of the pioneers of concept of the “Latin American” as an artistic strategy and political problem, Ríos creates a narrative through the scenic boundaries of different geographical areas in Peru, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Originally conceived as a three-screen projection, “The Ghost of Modernity” describes—following the cube as guide and intellectual witness—a raw visual journey through the crude and forgotten areas of the continent. But at the same time, it positions itself in relation to art criticism and history.

By reclaiming the cube as a symbol of the modern and of the pictorial boundaries that distinguished the white on white debate regarding the history of Western art, Miguel Angel Ríos makes a sharp blow to macro-discursive claims.

In contrast with his last videos, the artist abandons themes of the explicitly violent and the seduction of play, in order to explore the strategies of a leisurely and dusty cinematic time frame, unaware of the dynamic and bloody mechanisms of the global economy. In this way, Ríos returns to an inquiry on political identity, which underlies the Viewpoint of the Vanquished.

”The Ghost of Modernity” reinforces Ríos’ interest in cinematic narrative as an eyewitness of political thought in our socio-economic sphere. The work goes beyond the documentary qualities that make possible the innovative potential of the medium, without disregarding a critical understanding of the passage of time and its indifference toward post-colonial contrasts.

Nonetheless, an ironic surprise and humor will fall on the viewer. These are techniques that Ríos has explored in his artistic production, especially in the works devoted to the effects of drugs from traditional cultures, the exploitation of which lurk as confrontation and/or supplement of the purely existential in contemporary culture. Ríos’ proposal is one of confrontation, a process that starts in the conceptualization of narrative of the video and turns to the social sphere that shapes its form.

In the work presented on the upper galleries of the museum the artist seems to fight against the traditional concept of “studio.” This is a clash between the possibilities of drawing as an object versus the history that contains it; but also, between drawing as a medium and the reality that his video presents.

Ríos is one of those artists for whom the notion of displacement has marked his way of thinking; ideas that shine through his work, but curiously maintain his production at the edges of the Latin American continent. Hence Through the Frontier can be seen as a significant moment in the long career of this artist.

------

Carlos Motta
Shape of Freedom

Carlos Motta presents the Shape of Freedom, (a project that originated at the New Museum, New York) which investigates the history of sexual activism in Mexico. In collaboration with Susana Vargas, a researcher of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Motta delves into one of the least discussed and studied topics in Mexican art history through an interdisciplinary approach. Specifically, the piece presents the historical processes of the re-signification of the pink triangle—a symbol used by the Nazis in concentration camps to identify homosexuals—in Mexico and other Western countries to propose an alternative for individual autonomy.

Through the geometric harmony of a triangle and the complex history of its social use, Motta questions the present and future of sexual activism while leaving a graphic variation of the pink triangle on the facade of the museum pertaining to the Mexican problem.

Image: Miguel Ángel Ríos, "The Ghost of Modernity," 2012. Single chanel video. Courtesy of the artist.

Opening April 9, 2013 | 19:00 hrs.

Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros – La Tallera
Tres Picos 29, Colonia Polanco
Delegación Miguel Hidalgo, Distrito Federal México, 11560
Hours
Tuesday – Sunday: 10:00 a 18:00 hrs
Monday closed
Admission
Monday through Saturday
General admission $12.00 MXN
Free Entrance: sundays | 12 year old or less | students, teachers and senior citizens with an ID.

stampa

permanent link