33.97 x 33.97 cm
On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages. The work’s connection to Amazon deforestation is difficult to ignore. Yet still, it also engages in broader issues about the country’s fractures, such as the 2018 fire at Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum and the ongoing erasure of its past. The use of common household materials and instruments in a printmaking-like process places it squarely within a conceptual space aimed at destabilizing hierarchies. Victor Grippos’s 1972 Construction of a Traditional Rural Oven for Making Bread [Urban Action] is linked to the work embodied by free loaves of bread that Grippo distributed as an inflammatory gesture toward Argentina’s ruling military power. The images created by Lagomarsino are physically created in an oven, implying the fragility of geopolitics and the necessary destabilization of regimes.
Runo Lagomarsino’s installations, sculptures, and films provide alternative perspectives on historical, political, and cultural power dynamics. His work, which is concerned with how power relations have manifested in colonial contexts, calls hegemonic versions of history into question, particularly in South America. As a result, he frequently deviates from the images generated by these histories to displace and transform them. On the other hand, the artist does not seek to tell other stories, reveal hidden truths, or create new historical narratives from a colonized perspective. Instead, it aims to rewrite the same stories, exposing contradictory dependencies and complex political dynamics.
Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video...
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
Johanna Calle’s Abece “K” (2011) is part of a series of drawings (compiled into an artist book called Abece ) based on the alphabet...
450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site...
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...
This series of photographs, Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas (On Equality and Differences: Twin Houses) , taken in Havana in 2005, belongs to a wider group of works that the artist has been developing over many years, generally titled Bifurcaciones y encrucijadas (Forking Paths and Crossroads) ...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities...
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...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture...