Ketchup Session: Brook Andrew & Mariana Castillo Deball
Ketchup Session: Brook Andrew & Mariana Castillo Deball, hosted by Ivan Muñiz Reed Wednesday, September 29, 11 am PDT | 1 pm CDT The event will be live-streamed on YouTube . RSVP for Zoom link . Real-time captioning provided. This installment of Ketchup Sessions brings together Brook Andrew and Mariana Castillo Deball. The two artists discuss a shared interest in historical objects and the role that our physical and material past play in the construction of our histories and identities. Brief presentations about current work and ideas is followed by an informal dialogue moderated by curator Ivan Muñiz Reed. Brook Andrew is an Australian Wiradjuri artist, curator, and scholar who is driven by the collisions of intertwined narratives, often emerging from the mess of the “Colonial Wuba (hole).” This practice imagines alternative futures and challenges limitations imposed by ongoing colonial actions to re-center Indigenous ways of being. He was Artistic Director of the First Nations and artist-led NIRIN the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and is Enterprise Professor at the University of Melbourne. Their interdisciplinary practice harnesses a sovereign space to create work such as his recent 2021 ngarranga-birdyulang dhadharraa (post-traumatic theatre) play GABAN (strange) where the characters were based onngawal murrungamirra (powerful objects) inspired by actual Indigenous collections such as ethnographic photographs and ceremonial trees. Mariana Castillo Deball takes a kaleidoscopic approach, mediating between science, archaeology, and the visual arts and exploring the way in which these disciplines describe the world. Her installations, performances, sculptures, and editorial projects arise from the recombination of different languages that explore the role objects play in our identity and history. Her works result from a long research process, allowing her to study the different ways in which a historical object can be read as it presents a version of reality that informs and blends into a polyphonic panorama. Castillo Deball earned a BFA from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1997. In 2003, she completed a postgraduate program at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. Deball has been awarded the Prix de Rome (2004), Zurich Art Prize (2012), a fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute (2012), and the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst (2013). She lives and works in Berlin. Ivan Muñiz Reed is an independent curator, writer, and researcher with a keen interest in Australian and Latin American practices and decolonial perspectives from the global south. He is co-founder and former director of The Curators’ Department—an independent curatorial agency that aims to explore new models of cultural production—and was previously Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Muñiz Reed has written critical texts for museums and non-for-profits such as Kunstmuseum Basel, São Paulo Museum of Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and MCA Australia; scholarly publications such as the journals Broadsheet, Art and Australia, and Afterall; and is a regular contributor to art magazines and online publications such as ONCURATING and Art Monthly. Muñiz Reed has been collaborating with KADIST since 2018, and is currently their advisor for Australian acquisitions and partnerships.