Incorporación, desprendimiento
Gabriel Acevedo Velarde

OMR is pleased to present Incorporación, desprendimiento, an exhibition of recent work by Gabriel Acevedo Velarde (Lima, Peru, 1976) organized around an eponymous performance.  With this performance, the artist attempts to explain his presence in and interaction with social space by means of a map which he draws out of introspection, and which allows him to stop anchoring his location at a determined geographic point.  He replaces this with a diagram that is translated into the staging of his personal location as constant, regardless of surroundings.  Following a long series of experiments with animation that the artist has developed during the past year, according to a process not unlike the scientific method, the performance is presented simultaneously as a derivation of the gestures that have preceded it as well as the result at which Acevedo Velarde has arrived.

The bidirectional relationships between the individual and his environment (other people, the city, structures) represent one of the points of departure for Gabriel Acevedo Velarde's work.  By playing with these relationships and their limits, he proposes to construct a work of fiction that is concerned with how a system itself comes to be formed.

The first character in this fiction is the body, which remains an organic living body even when it is perceived to be the body of an apparently inanimate object like the spheres and cones in Acevedo Velarde's various diagrams.  Equating the nature of flesh and that of a metal sphere in the photographs of Revolucionario Conservador engenders ambivalent relationships – between harmony and antagonism – similar to those portrayed in science fiction: through contemporary technico-scientific possibilities, object and body are fused, lose their limits, mutate until they become new versions of familiar elements.  And in the case of pieces like Mongo Army, instead of the horror that traditionally accompanies such mutations, we find humor: confronted with these fusions of flesh-machine-surroundings, we are untroubled by the abjection that might seem to be their consequence.

In works like Caligrafías or the images of Revolucionario Conservador the body is not isolated: it is inserted in and made equivalent to others like it, forming systems in which information flows according to its own codes.  Thus Acevedo Velarde elaborates images of tiny universes contained within the limits of paper, the screen, the space of performance – universes whose rules promise to expand and to continue growing infectiously, as in a dance or a game without end.

The exhibition will remain open to the public until August 23, 2008.