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30/5/2007

Adriana Arenas

Casas Riegner Gallery, Bogota'

Solo show

Beginning May 31st and running through June 30th 2007, Casas Riegner Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition devoted to the latest artistic production by Colombian contemporary artist Adriana Arenas Ilian. Born in Pereira, Colombia, Adriana Arenas Ilian's artistic career has mainly developed outside her native country. Her work has been exhibited at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and at the Prague and La Habana Art Biennales. Arenas Ilian who has had solo exhibitions in Houston, Kansas, New York, Paris and Belgium will be showing her latest series "Lo grande que es perdonar" (The Greatness of Forgiving).

Arenas -- winner of the 39th Colombian National Artists Salon -- presents us with an exhibition comprised of digital paintings, videos, wall paper murals, holograms and photographs that refer to the idea of the unreal and invisible line intrinsic to the notions of lawfulness and unlawfulness: "An illegal act is made illegal when it is penalized. If an unlawful procedure is legalized it officially becomes legal," states Arenas. This idea of exploring the limits between that which is legal and that which is illegal, arises from Arenas' own reflection on a recent controversial moment when the Colombian government granted general pardon to paramilitaries by creating the "Justice and Peace Law"; this bill acts as an instrument that guarantees impunity for human rights abusers thereby decriminalizing and politicizing their activities.

The exploration of Colombian and Latin American popular culture and the appropriation of kitsch elements as a strategy to blur boundaries between high and low culture, to question the accepted definition of art and to comment on society's values, are all characteristics of Arenas' oeuvre. In this exhibition, Arenas utilizes the popular reggaeton song by Vico C and the famous salsa singer Gilberto Santa Rosa titled "Lo grande que es perdonar" (The Greatness of Forgiving), in an attempt to explore the theme of forgiveness. The song, which is an invitation to reestablish love, also symbolizes the inherent difficulties in issues of illegality, amnesty and decriminalization.

The installation features imagery that relates to clichéd representations of landscape, revolution, warfare and globalization which serve to highlight the "idyllic-warlike" nature underlying and structuring this exhibition. Arenas' compositions include elements such as the ever-present stackable plastic chair, a hammock with a nylon waterproof roof, and illustrations of native Colombian birds among other things, all of which point to the socio-political turmoils taking place in Colombia and elsewhere. The use of the popular reggaeton song is said to be the unifying factor in this formally heterogeneous exhibition; the artist superimposes the song with politically charged graphic and symbolic representations of globalization and the economy.

Besides delving into socio-political and ethical issues in her work, Adriana Arenas uses diverse media that show proof of her interest in exploring the formal and visual aspects of art production. The inclusion of aesthetic and conceptual components, undoubtedly makes "Lo grande que es perdonar" (The Greatness of Forgiving) a worthy and powerful exhibition.

The Greatness of Forgiving

In "Lo grande que es perdonar" [The Greatness of Forgiving], as in previous works, Adriana Arenas explores formal and technical aspects of art and visualization in order to decode their philosophical, political, contextual and poetic implications. This installation, composed of video, photography, animation, sculpture, and interpretations of the pictorial -- such as those contained in digital and technological techniques -- encompasses a series of reflections involving multiple references which question the problems of limitation and identity by means of the artist's own instruments.

This is the reason why Arenas' production repeatedly utilizes a pattern for producing an image which is altered until changing its appearance, thereby losing its identity and anecdotal character. Despite the fact that in this specific work there is an ongoing dialogue with the current conflicts and political processes taking place in Colombia, these are not the central themes of the project. Rather, the project is concerned with what develops from the basic facts of an event, and provides an explanation for their dynamics.

As opposed to a purely political art, Arenas' oeuvre reveals an interest in the formal, aesthetic and conceptual aspects of art production; in so doing, the artist reinforces an exercise in questioning and investigating the voice of form itself, rather than the literalness and hollowness of common realities. In this work, the accompanying audio suggests a love story intersected by schemes of economics and global dynamics which are necessary influences. These schemes progressively destroy the general idea of context and conflict, of the legal and the illegal, of truth and falsity, of the ugly and the beautiful and of kitsch and sophistication.

The discourse of illegality inherent in Arenas' work conveys information about other factors; an image and a subtext are construed which demand consideration and understanding at different levels and with other problems. Therefore, it is not just drug trafficking but the many formal aspects of trafficking which operate in a global economy today, and suppose the formation of control mechanisms and management that lie between the legal and the paralegal. Moreover, it is impossible to clearly detect -- without the clichés of finger-pointing -- the context of certain modes of conduct or collaborations and exchanges that are taking place.

The same thing occurs with the attempt to codify and give aesthetic importance to a style or a "look" which tries to be innovative, legitimizing what is simplistically adopted as a revolutionary conquest. Such an effort is not a revolutionary element within the system, and it will never reach the goal of modifying it. On the contrary, the codes will remain stable, ingenuous and unable to confront the speed and power of a given movement's recasting of communication and constant interchange, which can remodel every idea of reality.

In this sense, a wild plant that originated in Europe can be genetically modified in a Danish laboratory and become a biological agent used to detect land mines in a field; the same research procedure can later be used to generate a crop of coca which can survive glyphosate spraying to eradicate it and remain capable of increasing its reproductive capacities four times more than a normal plant. No matter how well-known are the factors that enter one or various scenarios, the variables presented by their contacts and hybridizations escape the imagination of what is systematic much before there can be any possibility of control. Nevertheless, once these real variables are identified, a representation can be enacted which may involve them in a larger format, or pursue and eliminate the dangers they represent.

Arenas' creative proposal is framed by the non-current ideas of the legal vs. the illegal and the concept of kitsch vs. sophistication. What is kitsch, in its codified sense, is obsolete, untransferable to the hybrids of contemporary concepts. Thus, the artist's treatment of the topic offers concerns that even oppose the ironic stance which she has generally adopted. Conceptions of taste - like notions of law, nation, democracy, values, or ethics that manage mass culture - correspond to an aging mechanism which continues to function because it dominates the masses that lack reflexive penetration; these depend on codes in order to communicate, progressively becoming unable to create new interpretations or express the significance of new occurrences.

Written by: Maria Iovino

Casas Riegner Gallery
Bogota'
Free admission

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