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Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives. Until it Makes Sense seems to say that faced with the confrontation of heterogeneous elements, coherence can only emerge with the passage of time. It suggests yet that sensitive and personal observation, after all, is a valid form of interpretation of history. Mario Garcia Torres makes his work from already written stories, whether real or fictitious. He creates new narratives based on documents and works of “mythical” artists such as Robert Barry, John Baldessari, or lesser known artists such as Allen Smithee or Oscar Neuestern.
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.
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...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
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...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...