3 min
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development). The motion pictures represented are, in order of appearance: Doctor Zhivago by Craig Wadlin; First Blood by Misti Traya; From Russia with Love by Vanessa Koellner; You Only Live Twice by Nate Harrison; The Godfather by Roberto Medina; Friday the 13th by Gregory Arlt; and Gone With The Wind by Margarita Reyes. Cinematographer: Kevin Merz. The old-fashioned grainy black and white film stock bring a certain distance or an artistic remove from these otherwise known actors in TV series or cinema. The approach is typically modest in presentation in the mode of performance art of the 1970s. The actors’ gestures hilariously attempt to represent a film at great speed. The success rate seems high as they evoke the popular culture they are charged to communicate. Strangely effectively they also capture general hints of violence and melodrama in the dictator’s taste.
Mario García Torres is a conceptual artist who engages with various media in his practice, including film, sound, performance, ‘museographic installations’ and video. García Torres often cites untold or ‘minor’ histories, with a predilection for avant-garde art and music from the 1960s and 70s as departing points for his work. He has recreated historical exhibitions and has even ‘completed’ unfinished artworks, often blurring original and reenactment, past and present, while questioning universal ideas about truth, certainty and time – all core ideas in the development of his body of work.
During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects...
Stretching between San Pedro and the beach in Altata, Sinaloa, there is a 40 km road where there are three invisible borders controlled by rivalling armed groups...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July...
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...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
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...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
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...
During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
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) ...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
By testing the limits of identification with the camera’s point of view, Delphi Falls cycles through multiple subjectivities...
“Untitled” is inspired by the movie “Opening Night” by John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands playing the role of a fallen woman, anguished by her distressed life...