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...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
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...
With Roca Carbón (Charcoal Rock, 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks...
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Johanna Calle’s Abece “K” (2011) is part of a series of drawings (compiled into an artist book called Abece ) based on the alphabet...
The work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096...
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...