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19/6/2014

Ivan Puig and Andres Padilla Domene

Furtherfield Gallery & Social Space, London

The Arts Catalyst in partnership with Furtherfield

“Adapting their car into a small personal railway locomotive, they travelled Mexico’s forgotten railways, many of which have slumped into disuse since the national railway system, created in the 19th century, was privatised in the 1990s.
Ruinous desolate stretches of track slowly decay back into the fertile landscape in the pictures they took on their journey into a past that is also an image of some dystopian future when our world is abandoned and reverts to jungle and forest.” Jonathan Jones –
The Ruin Hunters (The Guardian, 11th June 2014)

Artists
Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene (Los Ferronautas) built their striking silver road-rail SEFT-1 vehicle to explore the abandoned passenger railways of Mexico and Ecuador, capturing their journeys in videos, photographs and collected objects. The iconic Mexican railway infrastructure lies in ruins, much of it abandoned due to the privatisation of the railway system in 1995, when many passenger trains were withdrawn, lines cut off and communities isolated. In this, their first London exhibition, they explore how the ideology of progress is imprinted onto historic landscapes and reflect on the two poles of the social experience of technology - use and obsolescence.

Between 2010 and 2012, the artists travelled in the SEFT-1 across Mexico and Ecuador recording the landscapes and infrastructure around and between cities and interviewing people they met, often from communities isolated by Mexico’s passenger railway closures. They shared their findings online on a website where audiences could track the probe’s trajectory, view maps and images and listen to interviews.

The artists’ journeys led them to the notion of modern ruins: places and systems left behind quite recently, not because they were not functioning, but for a range of political and economical reasons.

In the second half of the 19th century the Mexican government had partnered with British companies to built the railway line that would connect Mexico City with the Atlantic Ocean – and beyond to Europe.
For this new exhibition, the artists are inviting British expert model railway constructors as collaborators, creating scale reproductions of specific Mexican railway ruins exactly as they are now. Part of the gallery becomes a space for the process of modelling ruins.
The room’s walls will show the pictures, documents, plans and other materials used as reference points for the meticulously elaborated ruin construction, in the manner of a dystopian time tunnel.

The actual SEFT-1 exploration vehicle will be situated outside the gallery on 20–22 June, 11–13 July, 18–20 July and 25–27 July 2014. Please feel free to take photographs of yourself with it.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ivan Puig (born 1977, Guadalajara, MX) has exhibited internationally in Mexico, Germany, Canada, Brazil and the United States. He is the recipient of a number of awards and residencies including the BBVA Bancomer Foundation Grant for the SEFT-1 project (2010-2011) and the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation (CIFO) Grant in 2010. Puig, a member of the collective TRiodO (with Marcela Armas and Gilberto Esparza), lives and works in Mexico City.

Andrés Padilla Domene (born 1986 in Guadalajara, MX) has exhibited work in various contexts including ISEA 2012 (Albuquerque, New Mexico), The National Museum of Art MUNAL (Mexico City, 2011), 04 Transitio_MX (Mexico, 2011), and EFRC, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (Qutio, Ecuador, 2012). His video work as director and producer with Camper Media includes documentaries, fiction films and TV shows.

The Arts Catalyst commissions art that experimentally and critically engages with science. We produce provocative, playful, risk-taking projects to spark dynamic conversations about our changing world.

With support from Embassy of Mexico, Arts Council England, Central de Maquetas.

Gallery tour with the artists, Saturday 21 June 2pm

Press enquiries
The Arts Catalyst t: +44 (0) 7977 226187 e: press@artscatalyst.org

Private View: Friday 20 June 6-8pm (Press preview 20 June, 5pm)

Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park London N4 2NQ
Hours:
Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 11am-6pm

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