My Father Avoids the Sirens’ Song

Exposición /
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Cuándo:
03 mar de 2016 - 30 abr de 2016

Inauguración:
03 mar de 2016

Comisariada por:
Berta Sichel

Organizada por:
Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner (ex-Josée Bienvenu Gallery)

Artistas participantes:
Beth Moysés, Elena del Rivero, Irina Botea, Lenora de Barros, María José Arjona, Mariana Vassileva, Narcisa Hirsch, Pilar Albarracín, Rosana Antolí Gisbert, Teresa Serrano

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Etiquetas
Video arte 

       

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Descripción de la Exposición

Josée Bienvenu is pleased to present the seventh installment of “Present” a series of guest curated exhibitions in the Project Space.­ The early mythological Sirens, those hybrid creatures that perched on rocky islands to seduce sailors with their honey-sweet songs, were the seed of the idea for this video program. Later, there were deformed and mumbling Sirens who “were neither dead nor alive”,_ living-dead creatures symbolizing the morbid embodiment of the end and inhabiting the level of purgatory – the location where Dante dreamed of Sirens. For Homer, too, Sirens and their song represent doom. Whoever listens to their voices must die. In Dante (19.58-60), the Sirens’ plight was purged “at the final three terraces.” It was Dante’s gaze that transformed this woman with her deformed body into an image of beauty with a harmonious voice. The contemporary narrative and reinterpretations of these figures composes a very different melody – one that empowers, and that cannot be interrupted. Sirens today chant songs of survival and emancipation. In 1974, before postmodernism turned out to be the agent provocateur refuting long-established theoretical frameworks of philosophy and cultural analysis, Margaret Atwood wrote a free-verse poem called Siren Song. Not much noticed at the time, Siren Song is now reevaluated, a cherished mainstay of poetry club websites, literary associations, feminist writings, and educational institutions. The ongoing revisions of women’s subjectivity and their place and presence in society gave a shine to Atwood’s little-known poem. Today, Siren Song is an ode to female energy and determination. After all, they left the island challenging the male desire to control every situation. My Father Avoids the Sirens’ Song includes 21 works by 12 artists from Europe and Latin America who are performing – though almost none of them see themselves as performance artists – the ballad of their laugh, the blues of their cry, the rhyme of their autonomy, the song of their jouissance. The performative acts by the artists selected for My Father Avoids the Sirens’ Song, whether inspired by established Body Art, by political and social activism, or conceived as delegate performance, manifest their artistic imagination, while the sound of their voices no longer destroys but calls for the transformation. -Berta Sichel

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