|
curarequito offered a series of contrasts (abstract/figurative, vertical/horizontal, material/immaterial). In an installation based on the preparatory discussions for the exhibition, Janneth Méndez offered the first step into the show. Using a personal and cryptic code, she reinterpreted the invitation we sent to the artists, in which we explained the motif for the exhibition, analyzing our words according to the keyboard fingering used to type them out and producing an indecipherable hieroglyph as an introductory text to the exhibition. The result, made of white plaster over a white wall, almost refused its incarnation, adding a formal layer of difficulty to the deciphering of the work. The whiteness and the size of Méndezís installation echoed the large pile of white porcelain by Zeger Reyers. His sculptural intervention, balanced on its own weight at the junction of the two exhibition rooms, embodied the possibility of failure, disaster, disequilibrium. Standing at the farthest end of the exhibition space, a curious cherub by Oscar Santillán, made of dried bits of paint, hiding a knife behind his back, was an uncanny presence beckoning the audience to walk across the room to see what was beyond the sculpture, beyond the exhibition, providing them with shifting perspectives on the mise en scéne. Santillánís sculpture recalled the headless, silent, abstract presence of Bettina Buckís work in the first room. A physical tension was created between these two works, positioned in twin spaces, because of their physical similarities (size, colour, position), although each retained its distinct mystery and mutism. As did the ghostly garden cultivated by Juana Córdova in the middle of the space, a fragile horizontal presence in contrast to the sharp verticality of the works by Reyers and Méndez but sharing their whiteness.
The goal of an exhibition is to unify a situation made of alterities: showing together, showing with. "The ‘withí is or constitutes the mark of unity/disunity, which in itself does not designate unity or disunity as that fixed substance which would undergird it; the ‘withí is not the sign of a reality, or even of an ‘intersubjective dimension.í [...] As such, it also constitutes the traction and tension, repulsion/attraction, of the ‘betweení-us. The ‘withí stays between us, and we stay between us, but only [as] the interval between us. [...] Therefore, it is not the case that the ‘withí is an addition to some prior Being; instead, the ‘withí is at the heart of Being."
Around the exhibition space, extending it by enclosing it, Amande In created one of the largest installations so far in her career, its bells musically framing the exhibition in a rain of gold at the entrances and exits. Manuel Saizís video dyptich, which looks at the absurdity of uncommon situations, played inside a screening room, its blackness in contrast to the whiteness of much of the exhibition, as though it were its ultimate depth, opposing strangeness with banality. Around the axis formed by these works, and in concordance with the particularities of the space, works by La Limpia, Dayana Rivera, Bettina Buck, Christian Proaño and Simon Clark occupied the niches of the former hospital, giving a musical rhythm to the installation and addressing strategies of translation (LaLimpia), interpretation and telepathy (Bettina Buck), revelation (Dayana Rivera), apparition (Christian Proaño) and disappearance (Simon Clark), through handicrafts, performances and videos. Just as the exhibition process questioned the role of the curators, several of the artworks questioned the role of the artist by delegating the production of the work to others. Who and where is the artist? Is it the person who conceives the work or the one who realises it? Proaño did not make any of his photographs nor did he collect most of them; LaLimpia left the design of their objects to the discretion of the fabricators they commissioned to do the work; Bettina Buck removed herself even further from the production process by using a proxy to communicate her commission to the embroiderers. But in every case the process originates with the artist. If the artistís intervention is barely visible in the final product, he or she is extremely present in its conceptualisation, haunting and thus owning it.
Viewing
An exhibition is a rhythmic composition of echoes, counterpoints, resonances, silences, which aims to make dynamic the physical presence and gaze of viewers. This dynamism has the utopian ambition of creating a community of artworks and viewers. By animating the sensorium, the exhibition seeks to include viewers in the community it has already created through the disposition of singularities. But even as this unity is achieved it encounters unavoidable paradoxes: that the sense of community is but an unalienated sense of individuality and that exhibition making is the work of assembling and dividing, a task that must remain invisible, hidden to the viewer, who should experience and enjoy, directly and with a certain naivety, the exhibition as a trajectory of discoveries. This is how, conceptually and formally, curarequito and its final exhibition Aparecidos were conceived and structured.
Vincent Honoré
May, 2007
Text edited by Michele Smith
Notes:
*This text was written for the curarequito projectís catalogue. Courtesy by Vincent Honoré, Artes No Decorativas and Museo de la Ciudad de Quito.
** curarequito was organized in Quito, Ecuador from January 7 to February 4 2007, and comprised a two weeks residency-workshop with five Ecuadorian artists and five European artists. It was undertaken by the collective Artes No Decorativas S.A., organized by the Museo de la Ciudad and curated by Cecilia Canziani (independent curator based in Rome) and Vincent Honoré (independent curator based in Paris, who then used to live in London and was working for Tate Modern). During that period the exhibition Aparecidos was organized with works produced in the Museo de la Ciudad.
Participant artists: Bettina Buck (Denmark), Simon Clark (United Kingdom), Juana Córdova (Ecuador), Amande In (France), Janeth Méndez (Ecuador), Christian Proaño (Ecuador), Zeger Reyers (Netherlands), Dayana Rivera (Ecuador), Manuel Saiz (España), La Limpia (Ecuador).
|
