White Corner

2006 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

8 minutes

Alexandre Arrechea

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White Corner (2006) is a video installation, projected on two protruding perpendicular walls. On one level the work constitutes a self-portrait of the artist, whose image is projected on both walls, separated by the corner. Yet while facing, they don’t quite confront each other. The projection on the left hand presents Arrechea wielding a machete, while on the right he holds a baseball bat. Together, the artist appears to be unwittingly attacking himself, a poignant comment on blind fear and the failure to recognize the similarity in the “otherness.”

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Alexandre Arrechea was born in 1970 in Trinidad, Cuba, and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 1994. In the early 1990s he was known as a member of the art collective Los Carpinteros, which he left in 2003 in order to pursue his career as a solo artist. Since then, his works have often explored the growing prominence of surveillance systems in contemporary society and the fragility, loss of privacy, and disempowerment that result from this obsession with control. Recently, Arrechea’s interest in the limits of the artwork itself has led to his creation of interdisciplinary works in public spaces.

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Colors:

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• otherness.n.01
• self.n.01
• attack.n.05
• self-portrait.n.01
• weapon.n.01
• fear.v.02
• cuban
• cuban contemporary artists