Dimensions variable.
A residency program in the blazing hot city of Honda, Colombia, inspired artist Nicolás Consuegra to consider the difficulty in understanding the needs of a distant community. An important town during the colonial era as the main port on the Magdalena River, Honda is presently rife with poverty, unemployment, and environmental deterioration. Here he produced the work Nadie sabe de la sed con que otro bebe (No one knows the thirst with which another drinks) , a variable arrangement of cut glasses in front of a mirror so that they appear whole. The title, a popular euphemism taken literally, affirms the impossibility of knowing another person’s experience. In a mirror reflection the glasses appear to be complete, manifesting an innate human paradox: a reflection of unity, but only as reversed projection or doubling.
Nicolás Consuegra (b. 1976, lives in Bogotá) explores the contradictions of modern visual culture through his photographs, sculptures, paintings, and installations. Much of his work deals with subtle differences between one thing and another, whether they are visual differences or semiotic shifts.
Consuegra’s Colombia is a mirror made in the shape of the artist’s home country—a silhouette that has an important resonance for the artist...
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...