Abstraction in Action Alexander Apostol, Elena Damiani, Aníbal López: Project 35: The Last Act https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/alexander-apostol-elena-damiani-anibal-lopez-project-35-last-act/

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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.

November 5, 2015 Patrick Hamilton & Aníbal López A-1 53167: Dear Mr. Thanatos https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/patrick-hamilton-anibal-lopez-1-53167-dear-mr-thanatos/

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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.
October 9, 2014 tepeu choc, Aníbal López A-1 53167 & Antonio Pichillá: The Thin Line https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/tepeu-choc-anibal-lopez-1-53167-antonio-pichilla-thin-line/

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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).

October 9, 2014 Erica Muralles Hazbun, Aníbal López A-1 53167, Darío Escobar: Dependencia inDEPENDENCIA2 https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/erica-muralles-hazbun-anibal-lopez-1-53167-dario-escobar-dependencia-independencia2/

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Artists: Lourdes de la Riva, Erica Muralles Hazbun, Aníbal López A-1 53167, Darío Escobar, Pablo Boneu, Hellen Ascoli, Luis González Palma, Mauricio Contreras-Paredes, Paola Beverini and Douglas Witmer.

Dependencia inDEPENDENCIA2
September 2 -30, 2014
Sol del Río Galería
Guatemala, Guatemala

 

September 16, 2014 The 9.99 Gallery: día a día / day by day https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/dario-escobar-anibal-lopez-a1-53167-patrick-hamilton-dia-dia-day-day/

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día a día / day by day
November  2013 – January 2014
The 9.99 Gallery
Guatemala City, Guatemala

The artist’s day by day develops in the studio, a space that serves as a laboratory of ideas. Just as the everyday governs most people’s lives—the teacher teaches every day or the doctor sees patients week after week—it also tends to provide a daily routine for the artist, allowing a pattern of reflection and research that leads to the creation of works of art based on his observation of the political, social, and cultural life of a city or country.

Day by Day is the fourth exhibition The 9.99 presents this year, bringing together six international artists: Patrick Hamilton and Sebastián Preece (Chile), Andrea Aragón, Darío Escobar and Aníbal López (A1-53167) (Guatemala) and Nery Gabriel Lemus (United States), all artists whose work tends to reflect the everyday of our lives.

Working in Santiago, Chile, Hamilton and Preece represent the new generation of artists from this South American country; both use everyday objects to map aspects of the city where they live. Hamilton’s elegant minimalist geometric forms made with sharp cutting razor wire, Composición con diamantes (Composition with diamonds, 2011), and pieces created with tools, Serrucho (Hand saw, 2013), speak of the social insecurity that forms in a country where recent economic wealth has not been distributed evenly. The decay of infrastructure in certain city neighborhoods is present in Volumen XIV (Volume XIV) and Volumen XVI (Volume XVI, both 2008) by Preece. The truncated history of everyday life is buried in the ruins that survive time, in the books that daily disintegrate into dust.

A daily routine involves facilitating the existence of human beings, but the work of Guatemalans Andrea Aragón, Darío Escobar and Aníbal López (A1 -53 167) evidence otherwise. Escobar has a group of paintings, which at first glance shows an abstract composition on a supposedly perfect sheet of white paper; under closer scrutiny one can see that the artist has torn the sheet in two. Dibujo interrumpido No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 (Interrupted drawing No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3, all 2013) represent a fractured society that tries to remedy injustices and historical errors with cosmetic fixes, but these breaks remain always there, even if difficult to see with the naked eye. The poignant photographs of Aragón, capture reality as it is, and it is often tough. Images De la serie “antipostales” (From the series “antipostcards,” 2001) and De la serie “Ghetto” (From the series “Ghetto,” 2010) sadly delve into what everyday life can be for people who live in a dilapidated house, with scruffy furniture and graffiti on the walls, or in those terrible and impersonal modern buildings that instead of making life more enjoyable make it an earthly hell. Listón de plástico negro de 250 mts. de largo x 4 mts. de ancho colgado sobre el puente del Incienso (Black plastic strip of 250 meters. long x 4 mts. wide hanging over the Incienso Bridge, 2003) by López (A1 -53 167) captures for posterity the grief that people express when the constitutional laws of the country are broken. The documentation of this action adds to the rich artistic and historical file that the artist has been building since the beginning of his career.

Nery Gabriel Lemus is a foreigner who should not be. The son of Guatemalan immigrants living in the United States, Lemus has developed his career in Los Angeles, California, which focuses on many of the tensions that routinely affect people in his condition. His foreign status gives him an objective distance that makes his observations not only very keen but are also permeated by nostalgia about what is not known but is sensed. De Guatemala a guatepeor (From Guatebad to guateworst, 2013) Lemus resists stigmatizing a country that has suffered daily violence while improvement and progress are also being achieved.

In Day by Day, artists seem to agree that not all is bad, nor all good, and that this constantly changing, precarious balance upholds the survival of mankind and is one in which the artist finds inspiration for his creative activities.

-Alma Ruiz F.

December 10, 2013 Aníbal López A-1 53167 https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/anibal-lopez/
Translated from Spanish

My work consists in propose to people a way of thinking that with plans or without them could unveil doubts or solutions. I would like to open a discourse where we could discuss themes that could help us solve our lives as a community. Basically, my work consists of questions and perspectives about the world with projections to the future, where armed conflicts are kids’ toys, for children that have faith in living and not in hating (to live without hate). Without forgetting to judge the ones who have brought us to these poverty conditions and misinformation. I do not consider myself conceptual or minimalist, but utilitarian of these mediums, as a precise way of approaching concrete subjects without much paraphernalia.

 

Mi trabajo consiste en proponer a las personas una forma de pensamiento que, con planes o sin ellos, descubran dudas o soluciones. Me gustaría poder entablar un discurso donde podamos discutir temas que nos ayuden a solucionar nuestras vidas en comunidad. Básicamente mi trabajo radica en interrogantes y perspectivas de un mundo con proyecciones al futuro donde los conflictos armados sean de juguete sin para niños que tengan fe en vivir y no en odiar (vivir sin odio). Pero sin olvidar juzgar a los que nos han llevado a estos estados de pobreza y mala información. No me considero conceptual ni minimalista, sino utilitario estos medios como forma precisa de abarcar temas más concretos sin tanta parafernalia.

Selected Biographical Information

Prizes / Fellowships

Solo Exhibitions

Group Exhibitions

Publications

November 7, 2013