13:00 minutes
Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible . Other well known works by Ramirez feature the movement and endless symbolism of the sea—like the simultaneous engagement and retreat of the tide—but La Memoria Verde takes the land, plant life, and its human inhabitants as its subject. The film begins with a soft, green, algae-like image that waxes and wanes in focus, then gives way to swaying treetops blowing in a soft wind. The calls of jungle insects and other fauna blend with intermittent notes played by a man on a saxophone, and the landscape on the ground, invoke lush, fertile, deep greens as if to color even the brass-made timbre. A woman describes, in a soft but deliberate whisper, a series of declarations that cite the plight of the land and the immigrant, the task of memory and of identity, of resistance and survival. La Memoria Verde calls upon the vibrant but dreamlike imagery of unstable memories, drawing the viewer into a hazy world encompassed by low light and dark hue. The work explores a verdant world through sight and sound, navigating the surviving variations of life, both human and rooted. Using lushness and overgrowth as a gesture of assertion and resistance, Ramirez connects the constant conflict and fluctuation of survival that both nature and man have in common. The film tells of imprinted traumas and the ways in which they become visible as scars, or manifest in movements that either protect or enhance their memory. In La Memoria Verde these gestures consume both flora and fauna.
Enrique Ramirez’s highly politicized practice engages both personal recollections and gathered stories, questions notions of exile, displacement, loss of memory, and a changing sense of place. Growing up in Santiago, Chile, his father was a sail-maker and Ramirez’s process often returns to the sea to bolster his investigations of movement, discovery, and geo-politics. The artist describes art and filmmaking as methods to communicate the ways society moves in cycles, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, especially regarding issues of immigration, border politics, and national identity. His seductive films and installations are sites of contemplation and imagination in their depiction of boundless space and expansive landscapes.
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...
Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...
Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...
© 2023 All rights reserved - The Eye of Photography Olivier Culmann, URSSAF Normandie, site du Havre @ Olivier Culmann Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Normandie, France 10/05/2023 © Olivier Culmann / Tendance Floue @ Thomas Jorion @ Sidonie Van Den @ Isabelle Scotta @ Carlo Lombardi S From October 21st to January 7th, 2024, for its 14th edition, 25 international photographers, both established and emerging, can be discovered in an open-air exhibition tour throughout the city, on the beach, and indoors at Point de Vue and Les Franciscaines...
In the video work Any Resemblance is Coincidental , CHEN Zhexiang mined portraits of real Asian criminals that were abandoned on the Internet...
n the opening scene of the video Power (La Fuerza) we see a mature woman asleep in a dark room...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
In Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Walking) (2011-2014), the sense of rhythm and timing is overpowered by the colossal sense of timelessness of this peculiar place...
Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench...
Made in cast bronze, Two Eyes Two Mouths provokes a strong sense of fleshiness as if manipulated by the hand of the artist pushing her fingers into wet clay or plaster to create gouges that represent eyes, mouths and the female reproductive organ...
Paloma Contreras Lomas sometimes incorporates large scale drawing into her practice...