Customizing Language
Curated by Idurre Alonso and Selene Preciado
January 7 – February 14, 2016
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Customizing Language critically examines how language reflects geopolitical realities. The project approaches language as a tool to reflect power relations, hierarchies, social differences, and historical problems, as well as a cultural system of belonging that can indicate the loss or reconfiguration of certain kinds of identities. The participating artists engage local and historical issues by using experimental language to create a dialogue with the audience, exploring issues of “custom” as cultural tradition, U.S. Customs as an immigration agency, and lowrider customization in popular culture.

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Artists: Carla Arocha & Stephane Schraenen, Alexander Apóstol, Miguel Braceli, Alberto Cavalieri, Arturo Herrera, Suwon Lee, Victor Lucena, Alfredo Ramírez.

BIG
September 27 – December 20, 2015
Espacio Monitor
Caracas, Venezuela

Karla Franceschi C.

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Artists: Vyacheslav Akhunov, Jonathas de Andrade, Meris Angioletti, Alexander Apóstol, Marwa Arsanios, Vartan Avakian, Azorro Group, Zbyněk Baladrán, Sammy Baloji, Yason Banal, Guy Ben-Ner, Michael Blum and Damir Nikšić, Deanna Bowen, Pavel Braila, Andrea Büttner, Robert Cauble, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Park Chan-Kyong, Chen Chieh-jen, Chto delat/What is to be done?, Josef Dabernig, Elena Damiani, Shezad Dawood, Manon de Boer, Jos de Gruyter &  Harald Thys, Angela Detanico, Annika Eriksson, Kota Ezawa, Antanas Gerlikas, Tamar Guimarães, Dan Halter, Annemarie Jacir, Ranbir Kaleka, Beryl Korot, Nestor Kruger, Rafael Lain, Lars Laumann, Aníbal López, Reynier Leyva Novo, Basim Magdy, Cinthia Marcelle, Bradley McCullum & Jacqueline Tarry, Anja Medved, Tracey Moffatt, Ivana Müller, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Ho Tzu Nyen, Ahmet Ögüt, Agnieszka Polska, Jenny Perlin, Daniela Paes Leao, Elodie Pong, The Propeller Group, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz,  Sara Ramo, Tracey Rose, Sona Safaei, Edwin Sánchez, Heino Schmid, Michael Stevenson, Stephen Sutcliffe, Yukihiro Taguchi, Prilla Tania, Alexander Ugay, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Wok the Rock, Zhou Xiaohu, Sun Xun, Jin-me Yoon, Dale Yudelman, Helen Zeru, Chen Zhou.

Project 35: The Last Act
ICI Independent Curators International, organized by Andrey Misiano
August 8, 2015 – January 31, 2016
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
Moscow, Russia

Project 35: The Last Act is an unprecedented exhibition of single-channel video works that reveal today’s global connectivity through art. It is the result of an extensive five-year project by Independent Curators International (ICI), which exclusively culminates at Garage. Project 35: The Last Act presents 70 video works from artists living and working all over the world—from Zimbabwe and Guatemala to Japan, from the USA and New Zealand to Kyrgyzstan, that have been selected by 70 leading curators who are part of ICI’s extensive network, including, Chus Martinez, Viktor Misiano, Hou Hanru, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Since 2010, different versions of the exhibition have been presented in over 50 institutions around the world. As the finale, this is the first time they will be screened together, providing a unique, global overview of video art now.

Showcasing many leading artists in Russia for the first time, the exhibition is also unusual for its “cinema” style presentation in Garage’s new auditorium. Each week there is a new, daily program of video works, which are each especially selected for audiences by eleven key creative people in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, such as Olga Chernishova (artist), Anton Belov (Garage Director), and Elena Yushina (independent curator), based on their personal interests and tastes. Visitors can watch for half an hour, an hour, or four hours—to see the “top picks” that each selector has made and why they liked them—and can keep coming back to see more works from more selectors over the winter months, all through January 2016. In this way the exhibition offers a flexible viewing opportunity for visitors to enjoy on their own time.

Project 35 began as the first international survey of what curators thought was the most interesting video art happening around the world since the new millennium, further revealing the ways in which artists are wanting to communicate today. To begin, 35 international curators selected 35 video works that ranged from reinterpretations of traditional philosophical propositions, to uprisings and protests in South Africa and emerging youth culture in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, to environmental exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then, in 2012, 35 new curators selected 35 new videos works, expanding the reach of the project to reflect the continued rise of video art as an important medium for artists. Together, the works reveal the diversity of approaches practitioners are taking to the medium, using various animation techniques, as well as borrowing from the language of cinema, performance, and even YouTube, to produce work that weaves between documentary and fiction formats.

The weekly screening program that takes place in the Garage Auditorium has been prepared in collaboration with Russian artists (Olga Chernyshova, Evgeny Granilshikov), film critics (Alexey Artamonov, Boris Nelepo), journalists (Maria Kravtsova), art critics (Alexander Evangeli), curators (Elena Yushina, Aperto gallery; Maya Kuzina, Documentary film center; Andrey Misiano, Garage) directors (Anton Belov, Garage) and theatre director who will choose their personal favourites from the wide range of works.

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Artists: Adolfo Bernal, Alex Cerveny, Alexander Apostol, Anna Bella Geiger, Armando Miguelez, Bouchra Khalili, Camille Henrot, Carolina Caycedo, Christy Gast, Dora Mejia, Elena Damiani, Jose Castrellon, Leyla Cardenas, Libia Posada, Luis Hernandez Mellizo, Manuela Ribadeneira, Margarita Pineda, Milena Bonilla, Monica Paez, Nicolas Consuegra, Oscar Farfan, Paola Monzillo, Sebastian Fierro, Tania Bruguera, Tulio Restrepo.

En y Entre Geografías / In and In Between Geographie
Curated by Emiliano Valdés
September 2 – November 9, 2015
MAMM Museo de Arte Moderno
Medellín, Colombia

After almost four decades of existence, the Medellín Museum of Modern Art begins a new phase with the opening of its Expansion in September. For the opening, the Museum will present En y entre Geografías (In and In Between Geographies) among eight other exhibitions. In and In Between Geographies brings together a group of international artists who incorporate in their practices research and physical, cultural and political thinking aspects that determine the location of human beings and how such aspects affect life conditions, including subjective parameters like desire and intellectual production. The exhibition is structured in three sections that address mobility in the early 21st century through a variety of research approaches: formal, political, and metaphorical.

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Artist: Alexander Apóstol

Yamaikaleter
August 13 – September 27, 2015
CAPC Contemporary Art Museum of Bordeaux
Bordeaux, France

The CAPC contemporary art museum of Bordeaux continues its program The Screen: Between Here and Elsewhere dedicated to films and videos by international artists, the museum will present from august to september the film Yamaikaleter made by the venezuelian artist  Alexander Apóstol.

This program is conceived by the guest curator, Anne Sophie Dianant.

Alexander Apóstol’s work is concerned with the consequences of South America’s political and cultural heritage. Using film, video and photography, the artist often introduces the relations between architecture and city-planning with regard to history. The film Yamaikaleter draws inspiration from Simón Bolivar’sThe Jamaica Letter, written in English on 14 May 1815, in which the Venezuelan statesman, an emblematic figure in the emancipation of the Spanish colonies in South America, developed his ideas.

Because the legacy of The Jamaica Letter has often been used to support any manner of political tendency, the artist has it read out loud by residents of a poor Caracas neighborhood, themselves leaders of different political groups (chavistas and anti-chavistas). These protagonists do not understand English, so the reading swiftly turns into a form-focused performance, a parody of a charisma-free discourse which seems devoid of meaning, but where we rediscover the corporal language and the intonation usually adopted by leaders. The artist proposes a deconstruction of the political discourse, keeping just the elements and codes to do with representation—the body language and the vocal intonation which punctuate the film.

Commissioned by the Goethe-Institut in 2009, Yamaikaleterwas screened at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Alexander Apóstol was born in 1969 in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. He lives and works between Madrid and Caracas. His solo exhibitions include Centro de la Imagen, Lima, Peru, 2011; MUSAC, Castilla y León, León, 2010; Arratia+Beer Gallery, Berlin, 2010; Harvard University, Boston, 2007 and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, 2006. He has taken part in the following group exhibitions: Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, 2013; Manifesta 9, Limburg, Belgium, 2012; 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2011; The End of Money, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2011; Photographic Typologies, Tate Modern, London, 2010-11; Atopia: Art and the City in the 21st Century, Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Barcelona, 2010. He was awarded the prize of the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio, Italy, 2012.

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Artists: Alexander Apóstol and Adán Vallecillo.

Geometría, Acción y Souvenirs del Discurso Insurgente (Geometry, Action and Souvenirs of the Insurgent Discourse)
Proyecto Fachada (Façade Project) 
December 18, 2014–March 15, 2015
Proyecto Siqueiros: Sala de Arte Público
Mexico City, Mexico

The new exhibitions at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros are centered on a dialogue regarding the leftist political positions that defined part of the strategies of the Modern Art movement in Mexico. Departing from the analysis of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s texts, Alexander Apóstol (b. 1969, Caracas) generates an interdisciplinary collective-practice in open conversation with science—specifically mathematics. His aim is to find possible representation stages that can displace Siqueiros’s writing towards a scientific codification; once deconstructed, it will imply the areas of music, dance, drawing and documentation as catalyst and witness of this research.

Geometría, Acción y Souvenirs del Discurso Insurgente (Geometry, Action and Souvenirs of the Insurgent Discourse) is the title with which Apóstol takes stand amongst Marxist discourses in Latin America; underlining political notions and the definite serial-character it attained on certain historical moments. His research departs from four texts written by Siqueiros: “Manifiesto del Sindicato de obreros, técnicos, pintores y escultores,” 1924; (Manifest of the Workers Union, Painters and Sculptors, 1924); “De tal generador, tal voltaje,” 1933 (Such Generator, Such Voltage, 1933); “En la guerra, arte de guerra,” 1943 (In War, Art of War, 1943); “Hacia la revolución técnica de la pintura,” 1932 (Towards the Technical Revolution in Painting, 1932)—texts where the muralist spoke about the political responsibility of artistic creation and the construction of a new art.

For Apóstol, the replica of these ideological ideas has been a constant in the region—traveling while shaped as assertive policies in servile idealization or absurd parody. Being so, his work is located in this path, breaking down and codifying Siqueiros’s political speech using science-based mechanisms of translation, in pursuit of returning it to representation stages in art.

The interest upon implying science in the translation of ideological-texts is a continuity of the “Absolute”—postulate that defined the inherited “Soviet ways of thinking” in those years. Departing from these four essays, information derives in theorems associated with ideological processes regarding four gnoseological and operative categories: Science, Faith, Politics and Economy. Every codification resolves in a mathematical absolute law, where not only its numerical synthesis rests, but its capacity to bear mechanical reproduction.

Parting from this process, the numbers are returned to the field of representation, where a group of high school students will attempt to interpret them via drawing—geometrical designs that Apóstol transforms in large-format murals. A group of dancers and choreographers displace the theorems (above mentioned) towards spatial-displacement, generating video-installations; finally, music students interpret the mathematical formulae—already converted into scores—carrying them to the field of sound interpretation (Live Act) in the museum space.

On other front, Adam Vallecillo (b. 1977, Honduras) creates a new Intervention for Proyecto Fachada (Façade Project) reflecting upon the relations between art and militancy. His project seeks the coming about of a critical debate that questions political presence as a constant in contemporary Conceptual Latin-American Art.

Composed by an Installation and an action piece—recovering David Alfaro Siqueiros as an emblematic figure of the political activist artist—as well as through various discussion encounters called Interpelaciones (Interpellations)—title that opens up an ongoing critical reflection process and its relation with Latin-American key-artists.

Geometría, Acción y Souvenirs del Discurso Insurgente (Geometry, Action and Souvenirs of the Insurgent Discourse), has been curated by Taiyana Pimentel, Director of Proyecto Siqueiros: SAPS-La Tallera, with curatorial coordination by Mariana Mañón Sepúlveda; while Proyecto Fachada (Façade Project) was curated by Yameli Mera, Curator of the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros.

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Artists: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Carlos Amorales, Armando Andrade Tudela, Alexander Apóstol, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Mariana Castillo Deball, Alejandro Cesarco, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Adriano Costa, Minerva Cuevas, Jonathas de Andrade, Wilson Díaz, Juan Downey, Rafael Ferrer, Regina José Galindo, Mario García Torres, Dominique González-Foerster, Tamar Guimaraes, Federico Herrero, Alfredo Jaar, Claudia Joskowicz, Runo Lagomarsino, David Lamelas, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Iván Navarro, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra, Javier Téllez, Erika Verzutti, and Carla Zaccagnini.

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today
June 13 – October 1, 2014
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York, USA

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today reconsiders the state of contemporary art in Latin America, investigating the creative responses of artists to complex, shared realities that have been influenced by colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises, and social inequality, as well as by concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development, and progress. The exhibition presents contemporary artistic responses to the past and present that are inscribed within this highly nuanced situation, exploring the assertions of alternative futures.

Organized by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, Under the Same Sun features works by 40 artists and collaborative duos from 15 countries. The artworks are organized around five themes: “Conceptualism and its Legacies,” “Tropicologies,” “Political Activism,” “Modernism and its Failures,” and “Participation/Emancipation.”

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Artists: Leonor Antunes, Alexander Apóstol, Alexandre Arrecha, Felipe Arturo, Alessandro Balteo Yazbek, Alberto Baraya, Carlos Bunga, Los Carpinteros, Jordi Colomer, Livia Corona, Felipe Dulzaides, Magdalena Fernández, Fernanda Fragateiro, Carlos Garaicoa, Mario García Torres, Terence Gower, Patrick Hamilton, Quisqueya Henríquez, Diango Hernández, Andre Komatsu, Runo Lagomarsino, Pablo León de la Barra, Maria Martínez-Cañas, Daniela Ortiz, Jorge Pardo, Manuel Piña, Ishmael Randall-Weeks, Mauro Restiffe, Pedro Reyes and Chemi Rosado-Seijo.

Beyond the Supersquare: On Modernism
May 1, 2014 – January 11, 2015
Bronx Museum
Bronx, NY, USA

The indelible influence of Latin American and Caribbean modernist architecture on contemporary artists will be explored by The Bronx Museum of the Arts in the exhibition Beyond the Supersquare, on view May 1, 2014 through January 11, 2015. The exhibition features 30 artists and more than 60 artworks—including photography, video, sculpture, installation, and drawing—that respond to major Modernist architectural projects constructed in Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1920s through the 1960s. Beyond the Supersquare examines the complicated legacies of Modernist architecture and thought—as embodied by the political, economic, environmental, and social challenges faced by countries throughout Latin America—through the unique perspective of artists working today.

The exhibition represents the culmination of a four-year research initiative at the Bronx Museum spearheaded by Executive Director Holly Block and Independent Curator María Inés Rodriguez. Many of the exhibition themes have grown out of a three-day conference held at the Bronx Museum in October 2011, during which artists, architects, urban planners, and scholars convened to discuss the enduring impact of Modernist architecture and ideas in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Beyond the Supersquare explores how contemporary artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions have responded to the aggressive rise of Latin America’s urban centers and the ways in which those urban areas have evolved since the mid-20th century. Also examined is the social critique of political, social, economic, and environmental issues in Latin America and the Caribbean, including unstable economies, ad hoc urbanism, militarized police forces, and rapidly exhausting natural resources. Exhibition designer Benedeta Monteverde of Mexico City has worked closely with the two curators to generate the exhibit plan for the galleries at the Bronx Museum.

Beyond the Supersquare will be accompanied by a volume, co-published by The Bronx Museum of the Arts and Fordham University Press, featuring original scholarship by noted Latin American architects, historians, and curators. Beyond the Supersquare: Art & Architecture after Modernism in Latin America will include material presented at the Museum’s 2011 Beyond the Supersquare conference led by Ms. Block and Ms. Rodríguez. The advisors for the conference were Carlos Brillembourg (Carlos Brillembourg Architects), Felipe Correa (Somatic Collaborative and Harvard Graduate School of Design), Ana Maria Duran (Estudio A0), Belmont Freeman (Belmont Freeman Architects), Jose Lira (University of Sao Paulo), Ligia Nobre (Independent Curator), and Pedro Reyes (Artist).

The volume will also include an image-rich folio highlighting artworks from the exhibition. Drawing from architectural projects of the 1940s to the 1960s, as well as from socially engaged artistic practices of the present day, the anthology will examine the consequences of the heroic and utopian ideals popular in architectural discourse during the Modernist era, which are evident in the vastly uneven economic conditions and socially disparate societies found throughout the region today

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Alexander Apóstol
Contrato Colectivo Cromosaturado
January 25 – March 8, 2014
Mor-Charpentier
Paris, France

Alexander Apóstol (1969) was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. Currently lives and works between Caracas and Madrid.

His work has been featured in numerous major solo and group exhibitions—in Spain, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, the Casa de América, the Palau de La Virreina, and the Fundación Telefónica; in Venezuela, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber, the Sala Mendoza, and the Museo Alejandro Otero; and in the United States at the Museo del Barrio, and the Art Museum of the Americas Society. His work has been presented in museums throughout South America, including the Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; the Centro Cultural Recoleta and the Centro Cultural San Martín in Argentina; the Centro Nacional de las Artes and the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico; and the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo de Costa Rica, among other venues.

Apóstol’s work has been represented in many international art fairs and events, including the Prague Biennial (2003 and 2005), the Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador (2004), the Istanbul Biennial (2003), Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, France (2003), the São Paulo Biennial (2002), PhotoEspaña in Madrid (2003), FotoFest in Houston, U.S.A. (2002), the Noorderlicht Photofestival in Groningen, the Netherlands (2002), the Havana Biennial (1997), and the Bienal de Barro de América in Caracas (2001).

Apóstol’s work has been featured in a variety of books, among them: Vitamin PH (Phaidon, 2006), Art Photography Now (Thames and Hudson, 2005), Blink (Phaidon, 2002), Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 2003), Mapas Abiertos (Lunwerg, 2003), Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America (University of Texas Press, 1997). Articles discussing his work have appeared in magazines and newpapers such as Aperture, Art Nexus, Beaux Arts Magazine, Artforum, European Photography, Art in America, Lápiz, Atlantica, Extracamara, and the New York Times. In 2004, Apóstol was the recipient of the first prize at the VIII International Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador. He was an artist in residence at the Casa de America, Madrid, during 2002. In 2003, Apóstol was awarded Spain’s Endesa Scholarship for Contemporary Art.

• Happenings

Translated from Spanish

During the ‘50s, the post-war scarcities were still latent, and the system took advantage of two buildings that met innovations in construction (concrete) and conceptually (offices, shops and housing in one), used by first-world countries, pretending to give an image of financial prosperity that had not reached Spain during that period of time. Similar attempts were limited, offering with this pair of towers in Plaza España an unreal, blurred and fictitious image of the Madrid of those days. Currently, the towers are part of millionaire real estate affairs, in a developed country that has based part of its economic prosperity in construction and real estate business; within a democratic system that, with its virtues and defects has not yet overcome the effects of Francoism. Therefore I propose the unfinished image, through trees, of the España Building and the Madrid Tower, as icons of a desire and a (failed?) moment in the history of the city; two towers that unsuccessfully tried to “hide” an adverse economic reality and that curiously, today coexist in a veiled social and political situation that is confusing and contradictory against the memory of the Spanish dictatorship. Thus they are two veiled situations, parallel to each other, that coexist in the history of the city and in which these buildings are protagonists and witnesses.

Durante los años cincuenta, las penurias de posguerra aún eran evidentes, y el sistema se valió de dos edificaciones que reunían innovaciones de construcción (hormigón) y conceptuales (oficinas, comercios y viviendas en uno) usadas en países primer-mundistas, para pretender dar una imagen de prosperidad económica que durante esos años aún no había llegado a España. Intentos similares fueron escasos, ofreciendo con este par de torres en la Plaza España, una imagen irreal, velada y ficticia de la Madrid de entonces. Ellas hoy día son parte de millonarias movidas inmobiliarias, en un país desarrollado que ha basado parte de su prosperidad económica en la construcción y negocios inmobiliarios; dentro de un sistema democrático que, en sus virtudes y defectos, aún no ha superado del todo las huellas de franquismo. Es por ello que propongo la imagen inconclusa, a través de árboles, del Edificio España y de la Torre Madrid, como iconos de un deseo y de un momento (fallido?) de la historia de la ciudad, unas torres que trataron infructuosamente de “ocultar” una realidad económica adversa y que, curiosamente, hoy conviven con una situación social y política velada, confusa y contradictoria ante la memoria de la dictadura española. Son por tanto dos situaciones veladas, en paralelo, que coexisten en la historia de la ciudad, y en la que estos edificios son protagonistas y testigos.

• Artists