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17/2/2006

StopOver

Fri Art - Kunsthalle Fribourg, Fribourg

A migrant exhibition

The exhibition Stopover is akin to Fiction ou re'alite'? ( 2003) and Shifting Worlds (2005), presented over the past years in the Centre d’art contemporain in Fribourg. Stopover queries not only the notion of migration and movement; it also highlights the fact that identities are shaped by real life experiences, and that they change throughout life. Confronted with the three original questions: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? Every individual tirelessly attempts to identify and recompose the fragmented image of his or her own condition. The artists of Stopover all pass through this infinite scenery, be it near or remote, composing and associating their vision with that of others. Their works reflect the difficulty of identifying with a homogeneous culture and launch a dialogue between breach and tradition.

Outside and upper ground level:

-The work by Eduardo Srur, named Acampamento dos anjos - Angels’ camp - (2004) presents an ephemeral campsite which he erects against the gable end facade of Fri-Art. This shelter is lit up from the inside and functions as a metaphor of the exhibition itself. The artist defines this work as an attempt at transcendence, a bridge spanning the physical and spiritual, the traditional and modern worlds, in which society establishes a direct alliance between the precarious and the sustainable.

-The Logradouro series (2005) by Marcos Chaves is an on-site installation. Architect by training, the artist likes to fashion space, constructing a vanishing game of signal codes (adhesive tape) which he transforms into a spatio-temporal experience. Astray between bearings and visual references, these safety zones circumscribe an unforeseeable threat.

-In do Ce'u, da Terra - of Sky, of Earth - (2003) by Joao Mode', space is both a conquest and a spiritual quest. Balloons bear messages, with their trajectory creating a dynamic metaphysical link between sky and earth.

- Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro’s Mundo maravilhoso dos objetos flutuantes - Marvellous world of floating objects - (2002/2005), assembles masterful sculptures to which the artist confers a material and an immaterial character. They evoke an organic universe which endows matter - alabaster - with a life of its own.

Disunions com lagartixas - Drawings with salamanders - (2002) by Lia Menna Barreto, are based on the tension between form and content - the salamanders. This tension discloses the powerful contradictions between a childlike and playful universe while adults seek sham and pretence. A dismantling of semiological fields and simulated images.

-The fish or ants in Love Lettering (2002) by Rivane Neuenschwander and Sergio Neuenschwander and World- Word (2001) by Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimaraes travel the world and draw the outlines of a story in which personal and collective memory poetically partakes of a universal language.

-The work of Ana Rolda'n, entitled Kill the Beest, plays on the words “bees" and “beast". Her aim is not only to intensify the uneasiness she creates within a bee swarm, but above all to highlight a disincarnate and oppressive world. Human beings, alienated and instrumentalized, have disappeared from this setting and are replaced by a fragment or a prosthesis, which takes on the shape of a seemingly fetishist and totalitarian leather glove. Metonymy of the artist and of artistic creation: the invisible hand cups honey, the symbol of affluence.

-With the Complexe du perroquet (2002) and the Promeneur (en the'orie), (2005), Julio Villani presents two works closely dedicated to Brazilian cultural anthropophagism and the history of Western art. With the parrot which vindicates “the work of art in the era of its mechanical reproduction" (Walter Benjamin) or the panegyric to Duchamps’ celibate machine, the artist pinpoints the industrious character of a hybrid culture, creating the illusory impression of multiplying paradoxes and bizarre elements in ceaseless movement.

-Joao Onofre’s video, entitled Untitled (mask tap dancer) (2005), presents a masked tap dancer strolling through a town, on a solitary quest which remains a mystery. The tap dance and the masquerade linked to a form of obsessive flight generate a schizophrenic dream terminating in a subway entrance. This ambiguous manner of affixing a moving image to a specific action sounds out the viewer’s critical capacity, and misleads him at the same time.

-Living Pictures / Dignidad (2002) by Sylvie Blocher is a video installation made with inhabitants of Buenos Aires. Alerted by the recruitment notice for the video shoot, these persons went to meet the artist, sporting their finest apparel and armed with a tune or a song. However, the critical economic situation made some of them “forget" the idea of glad rags, and replace them for the occasion by a “dignified attitude". They tell each other and us a story, their story. Then, unexpectedly, a man appears, reciting names of criminals. He is a son of one of The Disappeared.

-The double projection, Contagio (2002), by Toma's Ochoa tells the story of Victor Lo'pez, an actor in Buenos Aires. With the economic crisis at its peak, he decided to “go into the street" and live there with its denizens. A life of errantry and random encounters, projecting the outlines of singular and multiple lives. Landscapes unfold but do not resemble each other, contrasting elements unfurl greatness and decadence, aspects of animal and human existence.

Stairwell:

-Paola Junqueira presents a series of performances, entitled 24 Hours of a Hole, which she launched in 1998 and executed over ten years, i.e. until 2008. She regularly accumulates 24 hours of work per hole, and relates her experience through different cultures. The history of these holes is equivocal: the artist is motivated by the will to create a space for herself, but also by the desire to excavate a common stock of experiences worldwide. Also, for Paola Junqueira, “digging means to uncover the superposed layers of the earth, the sediments which tell its history."

-The video La Flecha de Zenon (1992) by Jorge Macchi and David Oubina conjures up a film leader. Numerals and decimals appear and disappear, subdividing endlessly. Inscribed in circles, these sequences refer to the difficulty of considering time, continuity, movement or the endless. Were artists to accept that it is impossible to endlessly divide time and space, they would have to refuse paradoxes, proving everything and its opposite.

First floor:

-With Helena Ignez - in cooperation with Fabio Delduque - Brazilian experimental cinema crosses a form installation entitled Electric Sganzerland. For the first time the cinematographic work of Rogerio Sganzerla will be presented both during the Fribourg International Film Festival and in Fri-Art, as a “film/installation" projecting a novel vision of the history of European cinema.

- Nils Nova’s stage structure combines various artistic media, appropriating a hybrid language in which the subject reconstructs a frustrated vision of the lost object. Altering the way in which media are usually read, the artist diverts and manipulates the image’s primeval function, by projecting it in a fictitious space. The perceiving subject must directly redefine his relationship with the work and his direct environment. Both denied and confirmed, image and information supplant the space to create a spatio-temporal experience that is both critical and cinematographic.

-AUTO Psi - 10 days in Sao Paulo (2003) by Fabiana de Barros and film-maker Michel Favre documents chance encounters. AUTO Psi is an urban intervention in which Fabiana de Barros asks fellow passengers to comment upon drawings and paintings while sharing a cab tour of Sao Paulo.

Stopover itself is a migrant exhibition subject to constant metamorphoses. It expands and mutates depending on locations and contingencies. Entitled Espace urbain X Nature intrinse'que, it was organized in 2005 - with Lia Menna Barreto, Fabiana de Barros, Michel Favre, Marcos Chaves, Joao Mode, Rivane Neuenschwander, Sergio Neuenschwander, Cao Guimaraes, Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro and Eduardo Srur - for the Espace Topographie de l’art in Paris by curator Evangelina Seiler, with Adon Peres as initiator and warrant of these migrant shows. Today it assumes a new form, grows and makes a stopover in Switzerland before bringing its travels to an end in Sao Paulo. Like the viewers strolling at will through the Fri-Art exhibition, it addresses the notions of transition and movement.

However, the aim is to review, at close or distant range, the discovery of the Latin American continent, experimenting with a hybrid and anthropophagous culture in poetic and humane terms (like cultural mixity, the anthropophagist movement which developed in the 20th century as part of Brazilian modernism, calls for the deconstruction of foreign cultures by the assimilation of their ideas and values generating an original vision of the world).The exhibition also takes a sociopolitical approach via documentaries and the cinema. Artists and film makers interweave viewpoints from different cultures, exploring the wealth and diversity of a sharply expanding world. Sao Paulo, Mexico City or Buenos Aires - these megalopoleis bear witness to the fascination and urban brutality which the opulence of a globalizing world wishes to impose worldwide.

Has Latin America not always personified the promise of a new world, while laboring under its own tragedy, the destruction of ancient civilizations and vast expanses of land? Is not this dual and unfinished trajectory its very strength? And does it not offer us an imaginary, multi-facetted voyage in a world that is more real than real?

Artists: Lia Menna Barreto, Fabiana de Barros & Michel Favre, Sylvie Blocher, Marcos Chaves, Helena Ignez & Fabio Delduque, Paola Junqueira, Jorge Macchi & David Oubina, Joao Mode, Rivane Neuenschwander & Sergio Neuenschwander , Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao Guimaraes, Nils Nova, Toma's Ochoa, Joao Onofre, Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro, Ana Rolda'n, Eduardo Srur, Julio Villani

Translation: Zosia Rosankowska

On Thursday, April 27 2006 at 20 h 00 at Fri-Art, film/projection de Brian Burman, Bahia de todos os samples and improvisation/ dance with Marisa Godoy | oona project (BR/CH)

On Thursday, April 6 / on Friday, April 7 at 20 H 00 at Fri-Art, M.AR.IM presents : HAZ MAT materiaux dangereux

Opening, February 17, from 6 pm - 12 pm

Fri-Art
22 petites-Rames - Fribourg

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