In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person. Since a photograph is fixed, it cannot encapsulate the spirit of someone who is gone. Muñoz etched onto the surface of a mirror an appropriated historical image, a daguerreotype from 1839. The viewer sees themselves as well as the subject, the chemist Robert Cornelius. The image is always changing, decaying, in a metaphor for life.
Óscar Muñoz is regarded as one of Colombia’s most important artists, recognized for creating an outstanding body of work over the past three decades in a country troubled by civil war and drug-related violence. He is also the cofounder of Lugar a Dudas (Room for Doubt), a vital art space for activating critical thinking and providing cultural exchange in Cali, Colombia. He is not formally trained in photography, but likes the medium for its capacity to illustrate the transformations of unstable materials such as charcoal, sugar, coffee, and breath. Muñoz is concerned with presence and absence, forgetting and remembering, and acts of engraving and impression. The physicality of the impression is a metaphor for the moment when a memory becomes fixed in the mind. Produced in the context of Colombia, in a culture of disappearance, his work is a profound metaphor for the human experience of life and death.
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement...
Defined as entropy, the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is more easily dispersed than it is concentrated...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
With Roca Carbon ( Charcoal Rock , 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
In his project Instituto de Vision (2008), Consuegra investigates how modernism gave rise to many new technological forms of vision, most notably the camera, yet also resulted in the disappearance of outmoded forms of vision...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
Casa de la cabeza (2011) is a drawing of the words of the title, which translate literally into English as “house of the head.” Ortiz uses this humorous phrase to engage the idea of living in your head....
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...