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Iñaki Bonillas: The Rain Came Last
April 9 - June 16 | 2013
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Sofia Borges: Reincidencia y Paradigma
January 26 - March 16 | 2013
Creo que mi investigación siempre partió de una reflexión sobre el lenguaje, y sobre la ausencia de sentido inherente de las cosas, y sobre algo cuando está vacío (no obstante, yo a veces pienso en el referente fotográfico como un cascarón).
Los trabajos se estructuran cada vez más por conjuntos y estrategias que se organizan para la constitución de un sujeto. Actualmente no tengo una línea conceptual que oriente mi práctica, inclusive mi producción se ha vuelto cada vez más “desorientada”. Voy haciendo, recogiendo, guardando, mirando, pensando, y en algún momento los trabajos se configuran, se convierten en una exposición. Y los títulos de éstas apuntan hacia eso, son partes importantes de un proceso de amalgama.
Aunque de cierta forma, es como si cada configuración de los trabajos abordase un mismo problema con preguntas distintas. Antes pensaba que mis exhibiciones (o series) eran siempre una respuesta a reflexiones que la serie anterior me había proporcionado. Es extraño, ya que siento cada vez más que siempre he hecho la misma cosa, solo que de exposición en exposición todos los nombres cambian.
-Sofia Borges
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FOOTNOTES ON CANDIDA HÖFER
Jose Dávila | Candida Höfer | Jorge Méndez Blake | Theo Michael | Daniel Silver | Erwin Wurm
november 10 | 2012 - january 13 | 2013
In language, the purpose of a footnote is to support and add reference, which expands on the significance of the text. Like footnotes, the works of Daniel Silver, Theo Michael, Erwin Wurm, Jose Dávila, and Jorge Méndez Blake bring forth a new context and dialogue to the photography of Candida Höfer, shifting her work out of its inherent two-dimensionality thereby permitting its wider meaning to be exposed. Each room acts as its own conversation, highlighting not only the multiple layers – both formal and conceptual – to Höfer´s work, but simultaneously granting us an insight into the preoccupations of Silver, Michael, Wurm, Dávila, and Méndez Blake´s own works.
Candida Höfer´s signature aesthetic, created by her use of formal similarity and emphasis on perspective, often forces us to overlook the strong conceptual practice underpinning her work. The German photographer’s time in Florence capturing the Uffizi shows her fascination with the concept as well as presentation of culturally made objects in space; an artwork within an artwork. Daniel Silver reverses this idea through the selection of his busts, seemingly allowing the artwork to come out of the photograph, thereby extending the perspective created within the picture plane and producing a new sense of spatial awareness to be felt.
Theo Michael´s installation of the entirety of his studio as a response to Höfer´s photograph of the Villa Stuck, re-iterates the concept of spatiality, inviting the viewer to actually inhabit and experience a space, in contrast to Höfer, whose method transports the viewer to a place whose physicality can only be imagined.
Candida Höfer´s photographs of the storage units in the Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden highlight the ghostlike quality prevalent throughout her work. The large-scale format and subsequent detail – a constant in her practice - allow the colors of the storage boxes to overwhelm the viewer with life, and yet somehow human life is missing. Erwin Wurm´s fountain and Jose Dávila´s sculptures – together an immersive presentation of human limbs – further brings to light this emptiness of human presence within Höfer´s work. Ironically, it is this lack of human presence that finally creates it, exposing the psychology of our social spaces that are otherwise often overlooked, deepening our understanding of how, and therefore who, we are.
Jorge Méndez Blake, on the other hand, was drawn to Trinity College Library Dublin V 2004, by Candida Höfer, because of a geographic relation between this and his two works exhibited at the show. Monumento a James Joyce and his in situ mural Sin título (Joyce's Goldenhair) reference the master work of James Joyce, Ulysses, which narrates the passage of the main character Leopold Bloom during a day in the Irish capital, birthplace of the writer and hometown of the Trinity College Library. Through this relation, Méndez Blake focuses on the how of who we are, in terms of the role our culture plays in our formation. For him, the library is simultaneously a storage and disseminator of this culture and his works present the visual results from this dialogue with culture, contrasting with Höfer´s photograph, which is a demonstration of how culture is presented, not formed.
Footnotes on Candida Höfer not only grants a wider perspective of Höfer´s work but also adds footnotes to the works of Daniel Silver, Theo Michael, Erwin Wurm, Jose Dávila, and Jorge Méndez Blake. The dialogue between the different media, photography and sculpture engages us to see greater possibilities inherent in each one, allowing for a deepened sense of communication, meaning and understanding to be brought forward overall.
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In X is not the new Y, solo exhibition by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, seven recent works make evident that absence and presence are not opposite concepts: in Bifurcación, sombra de obra 2 (Bifurcation, Shadow Object 2), the shadow of a branch hanging in the exhibition belongs to an entire tree.
Borders grow blurry when works created by way of algorithms come to be activated through the spectator's participation. The works have their own life, they are in constant flux and they are constructed through their interaction with the public. According to the artist, "the works are in a constant state of becoming: it's not that they 'are', but rather that they 'become'."
Presence and absence coexist in Lozano-Hemmer's work and definition when the heartbeat of someone who visited yesterday still palpitates today in the form of a light in the emblematic and poetic work Espiral de Corazonadas (Pulse Spiral). During an interval of time, people who don't know each other share the same space. Their hearts beat tirelessly together, until they are supplanted by a new presence.
The works have a memory and they temporarily save our faces, pulses, fingerprints, eyes, silhouette, or even breath in Último suspiro (Last Breath). The works watch over us and archive our vital signs, at the same time that we participants become observers: in Buscar la detección (Search Detection) we bear witness to news on the Internet that affirm that something has been detected.
There is no doubt that Lozano-Hemmer's experimental-electronic art has a point of departure in romanticism, solitude, uselessness and alterity, notions that make his pieces visually attractive with realities that occupy the same space, whether this be public or private.
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The Space Between Now and Then
assume vivid astro focus
José Arnaud-Bello
Atelier Van Lieshout
Iñaki Bonillas
Hekla Dógg Jónsdóttir & Sirra Sigrún Sigurdardóttir
Blair Chivers
Aldo Chaparro
Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins
Jose Dávila
Jeppe Hein
Gabriel de la Mora
Mounir Fatmi
Jorge Méndez Blake
Theo Michael
rAndom International
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Troika
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Nov. 23 - Feb. 18
Curada por Natalie Kovacs y Cristobal Riestra
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el52 presents the first solo exhibition in Mexico of the enigmatic Greek artist Theo Michael (Panorama, Greece, 1978). Michael works with the idea of time like a builder and destroyer of space: while in the present we erect thoughtful monuments for posterity, the future condemns them to destruction and the void.
His work, seemingly playful, uses pieces of real references to question archeological narratives and to present the element of subjectivity found in the process of constructing history. Using the method of collage in multiple mediums, he mixes incompatible elements and anachronisms that coexist in non-temporal or spatially specific theological and cultural universes.
The exhibition presents another series of drawings that discuss of a future in a 100 million years but one that appears to come from the archeological discoveries of the past. Using a hermetic language loaded with new meanings, Michael combines images and objects that project non-existent moments and places, negating the possibility for any one fixed interpretation and questioning the value of historicity.
Through formal associations and the challenge to empiricism and positivism of the nineteenth century, and with historical, mythological, political and popular references, Michael is postulated as a cosmic academic who on occasion, by revealing the knowledge of regressive mathematics, multiplies history and its actual meaning infinitely.
The works of Theo Michael have been exhibited in his native Greece, the United Kingdom, Thailand and Germany. He lives and works in Mexico since 2010.
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September 24 - 10 November / 2011
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“Rock shaped my life much more
than any single visual artist,
creating images was an artistic activity,
but music was my life.”
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El52 presents for the first time after 30 years of production, the artistic work of the legendary music promoter, Arturo Vega. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, from before the time of color TV, and resident of New York City since the 70’s, his work is influenced by his own life, Rock and Punk.
Arturo Vega was, for 22 years, the manager, artistic director, guardian and very close friend to the Ramones, creating not only their logo which later came to be the flag for the punk movement, but also many of their album covers and stage designs. Parallel to this historical music genre that transformed from the fashion to the attitude of its followers, Vega produced a solid body of work that includes paintings using a series of images taken from various media publications as well as fragments of the band lyrics, resulting in pieces that are both mystical and insulting.
Regardless of his strong belief in the revolutionary force of music that is able to provoke changes in society, in his visual works he is also influenced by the North American pop art. He makes a critique of the human necessity to form a part of capitalist systems, without really considering its consequences. There is something rebellious and seductive in Arturo Vega’s work that defies the social norms, causing people to question ideals and conformities through music, life and art.
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Mayo 28 - Julio 23 / 2011
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- The (in)exact hour will be transmitted in the surrounding area of Plaza Rio de Janeiro
- from April the 5th to the 21st of May on 98.0 FM.
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In Search of Lost Time (title taken from Proust´s novel), a solo exhibition by Julieta Aranda, is formed by a series of exercises to recover the last hour of “life” of the Mexican radio station XEQK-AM 1350 kHz, the radio station of the exact time. This station broadcasted continuously for seventy years until February 11 of 2008. Year when it became a frequency of tropical music as well as a research topic for Aranda whose work revolves around the notion of time, politicized subjectivity and media processes.
In Search of lost Time, invokes involuntary memories through the aural iconography which is present in our collective consciousness. Here, memory is activated by a logical fragmented process that appeals to the different ways of preserving a thought. For her first solo exhibition in Mexico, Aranda makes use of performance, sculpture, audio and installation, to return us back in time to a moment of ecstasy when every minute is equal to the one that follows and proceeds it.
Aranda’s work largely focuses on the political stand-point of individuals within the economic and cultural capital of a mediatized society, and subsequently, the various formats in which communication circulates today. Aranda has released her work through collaborations with other artists such as Anton Vidokle, with whom she also co-directs e-flux. A massively influential artist operated online agency that manages content and information on visual arts. Her work has been exhibited in institutions such as the Guggenheim and New Museum, both in New York, Portikus in Frankfurt, MUSAC, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others.
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Abr. 04 - May. 23 / 2011
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The french colective KOLKOZ, conformed by Samuel Boutruche (Avranches, France, 1972) and Benjamin Moreau (Paris, France 1973), presents its first individual show in Mexico at el52. The work presented is the product of a six month residence at Apaseo el Grande, Guanajuato. During their residence and following their usual line of production, the colective got involved with communities neighboring Apaseo and other regions of the center of Mexico to produce their work. In this way, KOLKOZ used as a platform local artesanal manufacturing to create among other pieces, paintings where the frame or structure that contains and sostains the painting becomes the painting itself. In their work we can find infinite variations of frames within frames where the limits between form and content disapear.
KOLKOZ is a colective founded in the first half of the nineties in Paris. Their work is part of a playful process that is activated by encountering the real and the virtual. Their work has been exhibited in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Centro Andalus de Arte Contemporaneo of Seville, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Gunadong in China and the Whitney Museum of New York.
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Feb 22 - Mar 22 | 2011
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El 52 is proud to present the first edition of the Biennial de el Fin, group show that addresses the issue of the collapse of Western civilization from the visual treatment that popular culture and entertainment industry have given to this subject. Under the initiative of the artists Artemio and Rubén Gutiérrez, the Biennial brings together the work of over twenty artists who have discussed the issue from perspectives related to the creation of chaotic and unrealistic scenarios, as well as the reinterpretation of apocalyptic fictions, deeply rooted in the collective imagination.
The works collected in this curatorial project range from symbolic acts of resistance, to the construction of chaotic scenarios, look for a thoughtful approach on situations or scenes that would occur in case of an impending global collapse.
In response to this radical vision, the collective TOA (Environmental Operations Workshop) propose the clinic HEDAS: adaptive design tools aimed to develop and collect tangible and intangible strategies, that allow us to imagine alternatives to the disaster.
The workshop is aimed at designers, artists and architects. And will take place in the Ninth edition of the International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory (SITAC) of February 3 to 6 at el52.
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Dic 15 - Enero 15 | 2011
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Remains by Carlos Bonil, combines a series of assemblages fabricated with parts and pieces of plastic bottles, jars and hangers, simple engines, disposable cutlery and other everyday objects that acquire a different dimension, and are charged with new meanings, when they are meticulously handled and transformed by the artist. The sculptures resulting from this recycling and adaptation process are realistic figures, characters from the specific universe that Bonil nurtures, where skeletons and diverse organs rest in jars and test tubes in a sort of contemporary cabinet of curiosities, generating a dark and exquisitely decadent atmosphere. His installations also include works that resemble automatic machines. Using principles from mechanics, physics and chemistry, Bonil creates robotic-organic breeds assimilating the environment of the workshop to that of the laboratory. Carlos Bonil proposes his very personal perspective when he relates artistic practice to science and, from empiric exploration, creates metaphors and compositions based on his personal energy and experience.
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Speranza (title borrowed from Daniel Dafoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe), is an aviary inhabited by 15 couples of Japanese canaries (avis finches zebra) where a series of drawings made by the collective Viernes, are intervened by the bird’s droppings, creating, in a processual manner during the two month duration of the installation, random patterns on the drawings. Speranza is a geographical dislocation in a concrete place where the artists aim at creating a habitat, a platform of circumstances, where entities of the same species generate behavioral patterns and relational systems within a contained and controlled space.
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July - Oct | 2010
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Public spaces in many Latin American cities are routinely occupied by itinerant architectures and a variety of apparatuses built for the purposes of street vending, and which emerge from situations related to the logic of exchange and the mass distribution of merchandise. In places like Mexico City, this phenomenon consists visually of an ephemeral architectural system of metallic grids, rolling vehicles and plastic crates, which together produce a complex, mutable system that can serve as a container for merchandise, a mode of transportation and a space of display, depending on its users’ needs. This ingenious modular system simultaneously incorporates urban space into the flow of capital, implying hierarchically structured dynamics of territoriality and, in some cases, clientelist practices.
Drawing on his study of this phenomenon as part of a residency carried out in Mexico between 2007 and 2008 (FONCA-CONACULTA), the Colombian artist Felipe Arturo (Bogota, 1979) has developed a system of construction based on the materials used in informal commerce. He has produced mobile structures and actions that recreate spaces of leisure and entertainment, adaptable to the conditions of each site and installed as interventions. Such is the case for the research project Trotsky’s exiles, which consisted of identifying the various cities in which the Russian political leader was exiled during the Tsarist and Stalinist regimes, and then locating those streets in Mexico City that bear the same names, thereby recreating a map of displacements on top of which the artist realized a series of ephemeral actions, which he registered on video. Thus el52 proposes a project for which Felipe Arturo has integrated his research on spontaneous architecture into the exhibition space, generating apparatuses such as the Itinerant community library, a work consisting of plastic crates and metallic bars that can be disassembled and reassembled, and thus function in different contexts. In this project, itinerance and informal commerce are transformed into a system that produces, distributes and recycles self-perpetuating structures. It invades art’s territory through ephemeral architectures that fuse the aesthetic notions of container and contained, superimposing the operations of vehicular transport, exhibition space and temporary image of the city.
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Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking my library” (1931), a text which refers to the author’s impulse to collect, Itinerant community library is a nomadic project still in development. It will be open to the public at el52 until 18 April 2010, after which it may travel to other venues. The intention is to gather the greatest possible quantity of books at each site where the work takes place, drawing on the voluntary donations of visitors. This piece will be inaugurated together with other itinerant stations by the artist, which will be used to present various programs of film and video for the duration of the exhibition.
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Feb - June | 2010
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During the month of August, the Mexico-based collective El Resplandor has pitched its creative tents in the spaces of EL 52. Each week the trio will produce a variety of memorabilia, ranging from appropriated poster prints to poncho-flags sown from collaged textiles, that become both theatrical backdrop and costume during the weekly rehearsals. Each element is created in a constant, reactionary impulse drawn from the collectively produced energy.
The emphasis lies in the continuous production, involving both spontaneous and researched elements, of artifacts representing the individual character of the group. At the heart of the project lie the progressive musical performances that equally express an impulsive instrumental dialogue between the members. Each day produces new works of art and further tunes whose processes are captured and documented to, in the end, provide ultimate transparency of the working methods. The audience is thus not excluded but encouraged to engage in and access the individual pieces to witness the construction of a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art) whose holistic creative product is on view at the opening night on the 29.08.2009.
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August - Nov | 2009
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| The show was conceived following a discussion between Pia Camil and Stefan Brüggemann with the intention to abandon individualistic practices in favor of collective ones, taking as a point of departure our shared interest to question the formal legacy of conceptual art. To an extent the show is a response to the present condition of contemporary art in Mexico which isn’t necessarily based on a social or political context destined to question and define the ‘Mexican identity’.
The decision to exhibit non-object based work was due to our interest on focusing the viewer’s attention in the artists’ methodology which is largely based in the objects economy of material, its immediacy, reproducibility and adaptation to different contexts; strategies derived from conceptual art, however, in most cases, the artists look for critical ways to subvert those systems of representation.
We wanted to position the art in an ‘in-between’ state of negotiation between the reproducible object and its dependence to a specific context. The work is thus perceived as subtle interventions to the space to the point of provoking a sense of void in the spectator making him or her more conscious of the space and the presence of the work (or the relationship between both). For example; vinyl texts (Aranda, Brüggemann), walls are delineated (Dávila), heaps of paper (Chaparro) and coal (Arnaud) are piled on the floors, or the floor itself of the gallery has been reconfigured (Camil).
As part of the show’s emphasis for immateriality, discourse and the exchange of ideas have become an important aspect of it. This is why we have dedicated a room of the exhibition space to a reference table with material suggested by the artists themselves such as books, magazines and movies that contextualize the exhibited work in a larger discourse. More over, the public will also have access to a blog where artists and public can take part as a way to facilitate the exchange of information, similar to a live archive or platform for discourse that will keep growing and evolving.
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| Artistas: Julieta Aranda, José Arnaud Bello, Stefan Brüggemann, Pia Camil, Aldo Chaparro y Jose Dávila |
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Agosto - Noviembre / 2009
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