Artists: Rosenda Álvarez Faro and Grabadores por Grabadores, Carlos Amorales, Francisca Aninat, Rodrigo Arteaga, Myrna Báez, David Beltrán, Hernaín Bravo, Fernando Bryce, Waltercio Caldas, Manuel Calderón, Johanna Calle, Luis Camnitzer, Tania Candiani, Claudia Casarino, Albert Chong, Lourdes Correa-Carlo, Elena Damiani, Annalee Davis, Paula Dittborn, Frances Gallardo, Carlos Garaicoa, Félix González Torres, María Elena González, Karlo Andrei Ibarra, José Iraola, Alfredo Jaar, Voluspa Jarpa, Ivelisse Jiménez, Leandro Katz, Lucia Koch, Irene Kopelman, Ricardo Lanzarini, Nicola López, Claudia Martínez Garay, Vik Muniz, Mônica Nador, Jesús Bubu Negrón, Rivane Neuenschwander, José Ortiz-Pagán, Amalia Pica, Isabel Ramírez, Sandra Ramos, Rosângela Rennó, Verónica Rivera, Nicolás Robbio, Mariana Rondón, Graciela Sacco, Rosemberg Sandoval, Oscar Santillán, Giancarlo Scaglia, the SEMEFO Collective, Daniel Senise, Edra Soto, Adán Vallecillo, and Alicia Villarreal.

Displaced Images / Images in Space
The 4th Poly/Graphic San Juan Triennial: Latin America and the Caribbean
Curators: Gerardo Mosquera (Chief Curator), Vanessa Hernández, Alexia Tala
October 24, 2015 – February 28, 2016
Institute of Puerto Rican Culture
San Juan, Puerto Rico

The Poly/Graphic Triennial of San Juan, Latin America, and the Caribbean represents the transformation of what was, for more than 30 years, one of the most important art events in Latin America and the Caribbean: the San Juan Biennial of Latin American Graphics. Created in 2004, the Triennial promotes experimentation in the graphic arts, stimulating the combination of traditional printmaking and contemporary practices within a different curatorial theme each year.

Under the curatorial team of distinguished art critic Gerardo Mosquera (Cuba) as chief curator and co-curators Alexia Tala Barril (Chile) and Vanessa Hernandez Gracia (Puerto Rico), this 4th edition, titled Displaced Images/Images in Space will examine the shift of the graphic image between fields, supports, habits, and techniques, and especially its projection into three-dimensional spaces.

This edition of the Triennial will feature 55 artists from Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as Latino artists residing in the United States.

This ambitious edition will include exhibitions, an educational program, events and publications throughout Puerto Rico, expanding beyond the capital city of San Juan to include spaces on the periphery and in other municipalities. As well, galleries and alternative spaces across the island will organize exhibitions in salute to the Triennial.

As a fundamental part of this 4th Triennial, an educational program has been designed whose aim is to develop and nurture creative thinking through participatory activities aimed at a variety of audiences and focusing on the exploration and collective recognition of the aesthetic experience. The project will feature activities that go beyond looking at art and entering the classroom as passive and hierarchical experiences.

The highlight of the workshops and lectures will be an international symposium, titled “The Contemporary Image: From Symbolic Space as Hegemony to Symbolic Space as Problematization,” to be held on October 25, 2015 in the theater of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Panelists scheduled to take part are Luis Camnitzer, Marta, Gili, Alfredo Jaar, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Cuauhtemoc Medina, and Beatríz Santiago Muñoz. This opening summit will bring together internal and external audiences of the 4th Triennial, and is aimed at promoting a discussion of the contemporary image, and the image in general, as social experience.

Amalia Pica, Venn Diagrams (In the spotlight), 2011, Focos en trípode, sensor de movimiento, gel de iluminación y grafito sobre la pared, Dimensiones variables, Obra: Cortesía de la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

• Happenings

Artists: Pablo Accinelli, Edgardo Aragón, Juan Araujo, Felipe Arturo, Nicolás Bacal, Milena Bonilla, Paloma Bosquê, Pia Camil, Bevenuto Chavajay, Marcelo Cidade, Donna Conlon & Jonathan Harker, Nicolás Consuegra, Minerva Cuevas, Elena Damiani, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Federico Herrero, Voluspa Jarpa, Runo Lagomarsino, Adriana Lara, Engel Leonardo, Valentina Liernur, Mateo López, Renata Lucas, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Nicolás Paris, Amalia Pica, Pablo Rasgado, Pedro Reyes, Adrián Villar Rojas, Gabriel Sierra, Clarissa Tossin, Carla Zaccagnini.

United States of Latin America
Curated by Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra
September 18, 2015 – January 3, 2016
Museum of Contemporary Art
Detroit, MI, USA

The exhibition United States of Latin America brings together more than thirty emerging artists from Latin America, many of whom will be exhibiting in the United States for the first time.

The show is based on an ongoing conversation between two curators, Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra, who for a number of years have exchanged research and information about artists, artworks, and the overall development of the art world from Mexico to Argentina and the many countries in between. The exhibition is an extension of this dialogue into the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit via artworks suggested in dialogue format.

United States of Latin America features a wide range of works in a variety of mediums, for instance a series of photographs about housing in Havana, a film about the effects of gang violence in Mexico, sculptures reflecting on the involvement of the CIA in Latin American dictatorships, drawings of historical monuments from the future, a floor map about the selling of Brazilian rubber to the United States, boulders from a Colombian river that have been turned into flip-flops, and paintings about the interplay of modernist houses, tropical vegetation, and utopian architecture. The individual artworks touch upon themes such as geography, history, urbanism, memory, colonialism, architecture, war, modernism, social inequality, regionalism, and power. Given how Latin America’s realities oscillate between the colonial and the contemporary, between severe economic hardships and enormous financial expansions, between flourishing democracies and suppressive dictatorships, and between great progress and immense regression, the exhibition presents an intentionally fragmented survey, a deliberately disjointed overview, of the region and the art being made there. It allows the viewer a glimpse into a reality that may seem geographically near, but is in many ways far away and unfamiliar.

The curators invited a number of writers and curators from throughout Latin America to contribute to a glossary of terms that articulate the region’s historical landscape and conceptual syntax. This glossary will be published in the exhibition catalogue along with a conversation between the curators, texts on all of the artists, images of the exhibited artworks, and a roundtable discussion featuring a number of curators based in Latin America.

Developed in collaboration with Kadist Art Foundation, United States of Latin America is curated by Jens Hoffmann, MOCAD senior curator at large, and Pablo León de la Barra, guest curator. A range of public programs and educational activities will run concurrently with the exhibition, including a public conversation with the curators, lectures by some of the participating artists, film screenings, and performances.

• Happenings

Artists: Pablo Accinelli, Doug Ashford, Claire Barclay, Rana Begum, Elena Damiani, Shezad Dawood, Annika Eriksson, Matias Faldbakken, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Ane Hjort Guttu, Tom Holert, Philippe Parreno, Amalia Pica, Bik Van der Pol, Yelena Popova, Walid Raad, Haegue Yang.

Future Light: Escaping Transparency
Curated by Maria Lind
June 11 – October 4, 2015
MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna
Vienna Biennale 2015 – Ideas for Change
Vienna, Austria

How come some features of the old Enlightenment have crept back and are now being revisited in art, activism, and theory? Why now, after just about a century problematizing, questioning and opposing its legacy? Perhaps it is an ever more economized, fragmented, privatized, and surveilled existence where, for instance, taxpayers are forced to compensate for the crimes of financial speculation and the gap between the rich and the poor is rapidly increasing. It now becomes enticing to return to some fundamental notions and phenomena inherited from the struggle for universal emancipation: the light of reason and rationality, the individual subject, and the public sphere. They point to a wish to explore vision from its very basics—as if to try to see anew, to radical transformations of desire and to challenges to ownership and property relations as we know them. And to do so while not losing sight of the future, in the midst of parallax views, in light of the hyper-contradictions of our time. A future beyond pre-emptive and algorithmic forecasting. Art has after all this capacity to function as part seismograph and part sniffer dog, detecting things not yet seen, gelled and shaped in other parts of society, creating new imaginaries. Whether utopian or dystopian, or an unclear mix of the two.

These basic notions in radically mutated forms seem to indicate a future affected by an emerging movement toward a new enlightenment, conscious of the violent heritage of the old one in whose name atrocities have been committed over the centuries. It is post-enlightenment, not as in “radical rupture” but as in “working through” some of its characteristics. This time it is acknowledging the tensions and contradictions of the enlightenment baggage, trying not to give up on the future while being embedded in the current condition of “retrotopia” where the past in general and “memorialism” in particular loom large. Thus, three strands of thought and action have crystallized within the framework ofFuture Light: non-penetrating light, the individual subject as reworked by the politics of queer-feminism and its polymorph desires, and the public spherereconceived through and as commons and commoning. Each strand is taking shape in a different institutional and spatial setting, accompanied by a reader entitled Future Light and the mini-symposium Politics of Shine, and partly prepared in a closed workshop in October 2013 as well as in a series of public MAK Nite Labs at the MAK.

Within contemporary art, instead of the penetrating light that gives clarity and transparency, there is the reflected and refracted light that creates opacity, abstraction, and shadows. It is the light that goes on and off, that does not serve as a searchlight and yet is able to nurture new beginnings. Besides conditioning human visual perception, its new forms—for example the low-power LED light—are having other literal effects on the look and taste of plants as well as the physical and medical conditions of humans and animals. Furthermore, the future remains a point of orientation in many of the artworks. All this is being played out in the group exhibition at the MAK. Existing paintings, videos, sculptures, and drawings by seventeen artists is making up an installation without walls but with plenty of natural light.

Theory and practice in the name of LGBT and queerness have for some time reshaped notions of the individual, subjectivity, and desire. If traditional notions of gender rely on heteronormative patriarchal formations of desire, then this linchpin is now being challenged in ways hitherto unseen, affected by synthetic extensions of identity such as hormonal drugs. Under the rubric of LOVING, REPEATING, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz are presenting three film-based works at Kunsthalle Wien. The installations convey filmed performances where the tensions between the individual and the collective carry a high degree of theatricality. While curtains and fumes create opacity, glitter and wigs indicate glamour. The characters who feature in these dramas are consciously multi-sided, defying normality, including the law and economy. Neither being entirely historical nor present, they project ahead in a truly anachronistic manner, to new and unrealized forms of enjoyment. Today many artistic and other projects revive the notions of “commons” and “commoning” in response to failures of capitalism and the increasing withdrawal of the welfare state. How will the Vienna Biennale of 2049 resurrect the voices of the citizens’ initiatives that have appeared during the past 130 years? With The Report, STEALTH.unlimited and Stefan Gruber together with Paul Currion shed light on how the achievements of these initiatives have been essential to the development of the city, yet have often been obscured by the political requirements of Vienna’s urban ambitions. Straddling the line between fiction and non-fiction, The Report will ask what it means to be a citizen of the smartest of all smart cities. It will be released as a limited printed edition in September 2049.

In a new film Marysia Lewandowska is exploring the commons as experienced through the kindergarten as an early testing ground for sharing, belonging, privacy and withdrawal. The project was triggered by the work and life of the Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000), in which many of the contradictions of the 20th century are played out, and involves the voice of Di Zhang, a young architect in Beijing for whom “the communism of commerce” is a lodestar. Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri are arranging an “unworkshop” around the politics of food and food production, which have been central concerns for the artists in their work on commons and commoning. The design, research and art studio Metahaven, who have developed the notion of “black transparency”, have co-conceptualized and designed the e-reader Future Light and the handout which connects the various parts of the overall project Future Light.

• Happenings

Artist: Amalia Pica

A∩B∩C∩A∩B∩C, a reading
Whitechapel Gallery
London, UK

The artist’s new immersive event centres on a projection of a film by Rafael Ortega, with actors narrating an abstract language of sounds, conceived by Amalia Pica.  The  film depicts a performance of Pica’s work A ∩ B ∩ C: a constellation of different configurations and intersections of shape and colour.  The performance continues the process of layering from the original work: from object, to performance, to film, returning again to performance.

• Happenings

Artist: Amalia Pica.

Switchboard
November 15, 2014 – March 1, 2015
Mostyn Gallery
Conwy, UK

Argentina-born artist Amalia Pica’s practice primarily explores her background; communal histories, myths, rites and traditions, as well as language and ways of communication. Her works include installation, photography, drawing and performance, with a specific focus on sculpture.

The exhibitions brings together work that looks at communication, particularly the act of listening and its ability to be both effective and also nuanced and fallible.

These themes, which have their basis in social interaction, will be reflected in the presentation of the work. Actions of touch and hearing are made equal and often as important as the viewer’s gaze.

• Happenings

Artist: Amalia Pica

One Thing After Another
June 5 – August 17, 2014
Curator: Sophie Kaplan
La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art
Rennes, France

Argentinian artist Amalia Pica‘s first solo show in France is a continuation of a project begun at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City in the summer of 2013. At La Criée she is presenting a group of sculptures and a new film in which she pursues her formal and political exploration of mathematical set theory. Pica’s works suggest systems of exchange, transmission and reception of information, at the same time as they offer a fresh reading of the avant-gardes and abstraction.

The issue of communication—of the statement and the performativity of verbal and non-verbal language—is a core concern for an artist committed to exploring its systems and modes of functioning. Through sculpture, photography, installation, performance and video, her work sets out to define the communicational codes we share beyond the barriers of language.

At the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 Pica presented Venn Diagrams (under the spotlight), a projection of two coloured circles inspired by the set theory John Venn developed to describe the logical-mathematical relationships of inclusion and exclusion. The Venn diagram reference is especially significant for this artist: under the 1976–1983 dictatorship in her native Argentina the diagrams were banned from the school curriculum on the grounds of their subversive potential for instigating group dynamics and expressions of collectivity. Thus her work foregrounds the inherent political aspect of information exchange.

Since 2013, first at Museo Tamayo in Mexico with the exhibition A∩B∩C, then at Herald St Gallery, London, Kunsthalle Lisbon, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and now at La Criée, Rennes, Pica has been replaying the issues raised by Venn’s diagrams. For A∩B∩C she arranged coloured geometrical plexiglas shapes along the gallery walls: the exhibition was regularly activated by performers who brought the shapes together at the centre of the space, held them up in a way that gave rise to certain combinations, put them back in a different place, and then repeated the exercise forming a new composition.

Photographs and a film resulted from these performances, and the film is being shown at La Criée together with a group of sculptures specially made for the exhibition. A joint venture with Mexican filmmaker Rafael Ortega, the film shows the shapes at rest, their slow activation by the performers and then the way they are combined, making up a new ‘sentence’ each time. As an attempt to start at the crucial point (the intersection) the two screens projection starts with such close angles of the shapes that the narrative appears extremely abstract and it slowly unveils the performance as the zoom travels outwards.

The sculptures—metal structures with the same coloured Perspex shapes suspended from them—are memorials of the different compositions formed by the performers in the film. Functioning as ‘fixatives’ of the shapes meetings, these visual statements form possible interpretations and narratives. Moreover the series synthesises many aspects of the history of abstract sculpture, including Minimalism, Kinetic Art and Constructivism.

Amalia Pica‘s exhibition at La Criée is a wordless narrative, an invitation to reflect on the construction, composition and effectiveness of all narrative and all language: in short, a visual semiotics.

Amalia Pica is born in 1978 in Neuquèn, Argentina. She lives and works in London.

Image: Amalia Pica, “Memorial for intersections #2″(detail), 2013. Courtesy Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam; Herald St., London; Johann Koenig, Berlin; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles. Photo: Bruno Lopes.

• Happenings

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.”

• Happenings

It has always been about the overlap between form and politics for me. I believe I need to occupy my own place in the world while taking responsibility for the way I do this, I have chosen to be an artist-this was not imposed upon me-and so I understand form to be my concern. I try to stay in the realm of the visual and the sensible as a means of defending that space itself, a space constantly open to redefinition-one in which subjectivity can be played out. This is why self-reflexivity can be important. To me it is a political stance. If one could say that art is concerned with the imagination, I believe that how imagination is formed is a pertinent question that also speaks to society in a larger sense. The ways we imagine and how we are conditioned to imagine are both artistic and political concerns to me.

Traducido del inglés

Para mí, siempre ha sido acerca de la superposición de la forma y la política. Creo que tengo que ocupar mi propio lugar en el mundo mientras me responsabilizo de la forma en la que lo hago. He elegido ser una artista—esto no fue impuesto sobre mí—así que entiendo la forma como interés. Intento permanecer en el ámbito de lo visual y lo sensible como modo de defender ese espacio, un espacio constantemente abierto a las redefiniciones, en el cual la subjetividad puede ser representada. Es por esto que la auto-reflexión puede ser importante. Es para mí una postura política. Si uno pudiera decir que el arte está interesado en la imaginación, creo que la manera en la que se forma la imaginación es también una pregunta pertinente que tiene que ver con la sociedad en un amplio sentido. Las formas en las que imaginaos y cómo estamos condicionados a imaginar son preocupaciones artísticas y políticas para mí.

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• 2005: Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten/Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
• 2003: Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• 2003: Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes P.P. (I.U.N.A.), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• 2001-2003: Clínica de Obra con Tulio de Sagastizabal.

Prizes / Fellowships

• 2011: Recipient of the Cisneros Fontanals Foundationʼs Grants & Commissions Program.
• 2011: Winner of Art Rotterdam, Illy Prize.
• 2007: Ayudas 07, Spain, C.C. Montehermoso.
• 2007: Certamen, Spain, Explum.
• 2005: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands.
• 2004: Madrid Abierto, Spain, Mention of the Jury.
• 2004: UNESCO-Aschberg, Germany.
• 2004: Bursaries for Artists programme Fundación Antorchas, Argentina.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2013: “Low Visibility”, Johann König, Berlin, Germany.
• 2013: Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2013: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA.
• 2013: List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA.
• 2012: Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK.
• 2012: “Amalia Pica – On paper”, Basis, Frankfurt.
• 2012: “For Shower Singers”, Modern Art Oxford, GB.
• 2012: “Chronic Listeners”, Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.
• 2011: University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
• 2011: “Endymion’s Journey”, Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles, USA.

Group Exhibitions

• 2013: “Emmy Moore’s Journal”, Salts, Basel, Switzerland.
• 2013: “The Future Generation Art Prize“, Venice 2013, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, Italy.
• 2013: Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, USA.
• 2013: “Silence, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, USA.
• 2013: “When Attitudes Became Form Became Attitudes”, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI, USA.
• 2013: “Version Control”, Arnolfini, Bristol, GB.
• 2013: “Ruins in Reverse”, Tate Modern, London, UK.
• 2012: “Common Ground”, Public Art Fund, New York, USA.

Publications

• Amalia Pica. Edited by Joao Ribas, Julie Rodrigues Widholm, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicag.
• Jacob Proctor: Amalia Pica. In: Artform, January 2013, p. 81.
• Amalia Pica in the studio with Charlotte Bonham-Carter. In: Art in America, June/July 2012, pp. 150-157.
• Amalia Pica. Edited by Malmö Konsthall, 2011.

Links

• Johann Koenig
• Marc Foxx
• Herald St

• Artists