40,6 x 50,8 cm
Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July. I traveled to Mali for three weeks and took some photographs related to my work. They are very different, but there are links as the graveyard of Timbuktu, which I discovered during the trip. I found the cemetery because I was interested in pottery and ceramics. Research traditions of ceramics were the reason for my trip to Africa in Mali, to understand, learn, appreciate what they did, because it is an important tradition in Mali. And then I discovered the cemetery in Timbuktu. It is interesting to see how the work will take you to discover places you would never have discovered if you did not work. So the link between what you do and what you find in a second time is very interesting. In this context, the exhibition presents one hand tables with ceramics. In addition, photographs of Mali are on the walls. There is no direct link. But it is obvious that the same person who is interested in these things. And there are many reasons for this.
Gabriel Orozco could be described as a traveler-artist, without a fixed studio. He works following contexts and produces work that flows. “Special Service” (1997) is a collage on a plane ticket, and indicates nomadism, between territories. The artist, who is the son of muralist Mario Orozco Riviera, questions the boundaries of his artistic identity in Mexico. In “Crazy tourist” (1991), Orozco creates a situation with oranges in the Brazilian market tables in a desert. The artist uses objects or “poor” situations, found in the everyday landscape, natural or urban. By their division, their juxtaposition, or collage, inventing semantic or sensitive scenarios, always surprising, sometimes humorous and sometimes lyrical … The sculptural practice of the artist, inseparable from his drawings, photographs, or films, invents relationships of space, and disrupts our perception of objects. Such is the case of “Yielding Stone” (1992), a photo of a plasticine ball, the weight of the artist, rolled through the streets of New York. Gabriel Orozco was born in 1962 in Jalapa, Mexico. He lives and works in New York, Mexico, and Paris.
In Perpetual Motion (2005) the seemingly erratic flight of the bright orange Monarch butterfly—filmed in its winter habitat of Michoacán, Mexico—is intensified by the artist’s editing in which frames are randomly dropped and the film is sped up...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California...
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994)...
Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object...