Happenings

Happenings provides references on art events, exhibitions, biennales, art fairs and festivals, with a focus on Abstraction in Action artists and post-90s abstraction from Latin America.

Alberto Borea: We Are All Gone

unnamed copy

Artist: Alberto Borea

We Are All Gone
October 10 – November 12, 2014
Y Gallery
New York, USA

Continuing with his research on cartography, urban identity and the relation between center and periphery, the artist presents a group of works derived from recent explorations. Borea takes the position of an “archeologist of the contemporary” who rescues the materials and used objects which are “residues of civilization“. These artifacts are undergoing a creative process leading to innovative results featuring the artist´s unique vision about ruins and progress.

A cage that is broken and open, “We Are All Gone” shows the tautness derived from the concept of “contention”. This sculpture works as an expanded drawing. Chaos, transgression and geometry coexist in the paradoxical nature of this piece.

In “Haus”, the german word for house, the artist recycles and transforms four doors of New York City taxi cabs. The resulting object is a hybrid device sharing the characteristics of a living architectural structure and a moving vehicle. Permanence and transition are concepts in dialogue in these four works, which are settled on the exploration of what has been called heterotopic spaces.
“Immigration”, on the other hand, is a sculpture made with a metal cement trowel and wheels that the artist found in the streets of Lima. This object is a strong statement about  roots, transit, migration, and art as a social and spiritual practice. For “Self-portrait”, Borea works with the idea of souvenir and global identity. The bottle with an Inca portrait named Biondi is attached to a corn broom, this combination of two different things leads to the creation of a new object. This innovative device shows the different layers of cultural information and manipulation, leaving for posterity a new sort of “huaco”or totem.

The transitional nature of existence is an underlying conceptual principle common to all the works in the show. They are the result of a sensitive reaction to the contemporary and its physical expression, manifested in the combination and manipulations of objects leading to new metaphorical artifacts.

Alberto Borea lives and works between New York and Lima. His work is characterized by the continuous displacement and use of diverse media and materials. He attended residencies and fellowships including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, (Fundacion Cisneros de Patricia de Phelps), Art Omi International Residency 2009, Vermont Studio Center (Jackson Pollock Krasner Fellowship), International Studio and Curatorial Program NYC (ISCP), Sculpture Space, Utica, NY, Default Masterclass in residence, Lecce and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC).  Borea’s work has been shown in diverse exhibitions in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. including Queens Museum of Art in New York City, Museo del Barrio in New York City, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Cisneros Fontanals Collection), Dublin Contemporary, Museo Laboratorio in Italy, Art Museum of the Americas in DC, and Museo de Huelva in Spain.

Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen, Leyla Cárdenas, José Dávila, and Pablo Rasgado: Limited Visibility

Screenshot 2014-09-29 12.13.38

Artists: Allora and Calzadilla, Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen, Laura Belém, Jorge Méndez Blake, Leyla Cárdenas, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Jose Dávila, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Moris, Oscar Muñoz, Daniela Ortiz, Pablo Rasgado, Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith, and Agustina Woodgate.

Limited Visibility
Curated by Patricia Garcia-Velez Hanna and Natalia Zuluaga
October 3, 2014 – January 4, 2015
CAM (Contemporary Art Museum) Raleigh
Raleigh, NC, USA

Voluntary omission, erasure, withholding, and concealment: these are the methods the artists in Limited Visibility employ in order to draw attention to that which is missing. The representations of absence such as the missing object of labor in Allora & Calzadilla’s sandpaper composition or the cutouts in Jose Dávila’s photographs play a key role in this exhibition as they determine, border and define the void they surround. What we see in these images, paintings, and installations is what is not there: each work absents presence and presents something absent. Seer, seen, and unseen come together here to evoke the haunted sensation of searching and looking. Though the aims of each of the works in this exhibition are different—from a demand for political representation to the materialization of an otherwise ephemeral moment—the artists in Limited Visibility draw our attention to the omitted, giving it a kind of determination or persistence that is hard to ignore. In each case, the viewer is required a certain amount of belief to fill in that which is not visibly available—these are not riddles, but questions with actual answers in the form of artworks.
Patricia Garcia-Velez Hanna and Natalia Zuluaga

Image: Top – Left to Right: Jorge Méndez Blake – Hotel Monturiol, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer – Make Out, Jose Dávila – Topologies of Belief, Allora & Calzadilla – Shape Shifter. Bottom – Left to Right: Laura Belém – Temple of One Thousand Bells, Santiago Sierra – 89 Huicholes, Moris – Miradas I

 

Patrick Hamilton & Aníbal López A-1 53167: Dear Mr. Thanatos

Wheel lock 01 (2014) web

Artists: Regina José Galindo, Patrick Hamilton, Anibal López A-1 53167, Ana Mendieta, Teresa Margolles, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, José Guadalupe Posada, and Jorge Tacla.

Dear Mr. Thanatos, Modern and Contemporary Art from Latin America
Curated By Christian Viveros-Fauné
October 2 – December 13, 2014
Cristin Tierney Gallery
New York, USA

Dear Mr. Thanatos: Modern and Contemporary Art from Latin America curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, is a missive or love letter to the dark forces—death, destruction, war, political violence, etc.—as seen through the lens of modern and contemporary Latin American art.Proposed by psychoanalytic theory as the “death drive” in opposition to Eros—the tendency toward survival, propagation, and the life-giving pleasure principle—Thanatos describes, in Sigmund Freud’s terms, “the inclination to aggression,” which the Austrian thinker defined “[as] the greatest impediment to civilization.”The themes of death, aggression, and psychic and physical violence have long been central to contemporary Latin American artists. Because of Latin America’s violent history, most artists from the region find themselves at most a single generation away from large-scale collective manifestations of the “instinct toward aggression”—with its devastating effects on local societies. From the repeated figure of Santa Muerte evoked by turn of the century Mexican engraver and cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada to Jorge Tacla’s paintings of bombed out buildings in the Middle East to the mortuary and burial-related video and sculpture of Guatemalan Regina José Galindo, artists throughout Latin America have repeatedly turned to the subject of death to express not just existential dread, but the reality of living the examined life in situations of heightened insecurity.
Some Latin American artists—like those in this exhibition—draw creative sustenance from these experiences and often interpret their reflections in the context of social, political and cultural advances. That is the role the destabilizing spirit of Thanatos assumes in the minimalist-inspired sculptures of Chilean artist Patrick Hamilton and the radically unstable structures of Mexican sculptor Alejandro Almanza Pereda. Others, like Ana Mendieta and the Guatemalan Anibal López connect dramatically to specific narratives of violence as urgent subjects for their video and photography.
The death instinct is familiar to all of them, as it is to millions of other people around the world. Like language, geography and identity, Thanatos remains an important part of Latin American art’s peculiar symbolic inheritance to this day.

Image: Patrick Hamilton, Wheel lock #1, 2014. Copper. 5.9 x 21.65 x 5.11 inches.

tepeu choc, Aníbal López A-1 53167 & Antonio Pichillá: The Thin Line

999

Artists: Mauricio Esquivel, Adam Winner, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Marilyn Boror, tepeu choc, Jorge Linares, Aníbal López A-1 53167, Antonio Pichillá, Gabriel Rodríguez, Diego Sagastume, Inés Verdugo.

The Thin Line
October 16, 2014
The 9.99 Gallery
Guatemala City, Guatemala

The exhibition will show the work of the artists Mauricio Esquivel (El Salvador), Adam Winner (USA), Esvin Alarcón Lam, Marilyn Boror, Tepeu Choc, Jorge Linares, Aníbal López (A-1 53167), Antonio Pichillá,  Gabriel Rodríguez, Diego Sagastume, Inés Verdugo (Guatemala).