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.
January 6, 2015