Galeria Vermelho is presenting Somos [We Are], Iván Argote’s second solo show at the gallery, from September 5 through October 7, 2017. At the same time, the Sala Antonio screening room will feature Reddishblue Memories (2017), also by Argote.
Born in 1983, in Bogotá, Colombia, Iván Argote took up residence in Paris in 2006. His work explores human behavior, the way people relate with their environment and our inexplicable links to history, tradition, art, politics and power. Argote creates public installations, videos, photographs and sculptures. Public monuments and statues are recurrent themes in his work, which questions the mechanisms of power and authority. Argote explores the city as a place of transformation and possibilities.
His works have participated in various international exhibitions including Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, 2017; Iván Argote: La Venganza del Amor (solo), Galerie Perrotin New York, New York, 2017; Sírvete de mi, sírveme...de ti (solo) Proyecto Amil, Lima, 2016; An Idea of Progress (solo), SPACE, London, 2016; Intersections, Cisneros Fountanals Foundation, Miami, 2015; Between the Pessimism of the Intellect and the Optimism of the Will, 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, Thessaloniki, 2015; La Estrategia (solo), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013; Tectonic, Moving Museum, Dubai, 2013; Los irrespetuosos, Museo Carrilo Gil, Mexico DF, 2013; 30th Biennial of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2012, and others.
Iván Argote has been conferred the CIFO Grant – Cisneros Fontanals Foundation (2015), the Audi Talents Award (2013) and the SAM Art Projects Prize (2011). In 2017 he was among the five finalists for the Future Generation Art Prize, of the Pinchuk Art Centre, in Kiev, Ukraine.
Somos
In his film As far as we could get, Iván Argote digs an metaphorical tunnel in between Indonesia and Colombia, connecting two cities, Palembang and Neiva respectively. The two municipalities are an exact antipodal pair, situated at diametrically opposite points of the globe. Argote established relationships with the inhabitants of similar social conditions in the two countries, focusing on young people born on the same day as the fall of the Berlin Wall. The artist breaks down geopolitical and emotional borders to portray those who arose simultaneously with the end of a physical barrier that divided a single people separated by beliefs, principles and myths. Feelings, Memory and History circulate and approach the political extremities of the earth’s surface.
Another approximation perceived in the film are the billboards installed by the artist in both cities, announcing the film La Venganza Del Amor [The Revenge of Love]. The film announced within the film might appear ominous, but it is benevolent, as a response to time, to the current moment which is, in many places, one of hostility in relation to the other, to the foreigner or to those who are different. The forecast for the revenge of love is that in the clashing with barriers, love will prevail.
This clashing between the sensitive and insensitive establishes the rhythm for the other pieces that make up the exhibition, including the confrontation that takes place in the film that is unfolded in seven chapters, making the room brighten and darken in intervals that mark the rhythm of the observation of the pieces – while a chapter is being screened, the room becomes dark and vice versa. In the same room as As far as we could get there is a group of sculptures made up of carbon-steel sheets pierced and cut by laser, entitled Sombras [Shadows]. Each sculpture is formed by different sheets of steel that overlay different sayings one atop the other, forming anthems based on this superpositioning. Phrases that could be on protest posters are mixed with affective revelations, once again breaking down the line between sensitivity and rationality, as in No Site is Innocent (2017), which mixes the phrase of the title with a term of loving affection: My Dear.
On the ground floor, Argote manipulates the idea of the monument as a work constructed for the memorialist perpetuation of a person or fact relevant to some community. In Arco [Arc], the artist disassembles a circle of concrete of impactful proportions in six parts that are leaning against the walls and lying on the floor, as though they were lacking bases that could define them as self-supporting monuments. Argote’s monuments are fractured and celebrate the interruption of a circular history that could be tragically repeated. In Sírvete de mi, Sírveme de ti [Serve Yourself of Me, I Serve Myself of You] (2017), Iván Argote proposes another “manner” of monument, constituted by a long line of human hands that are interconnected like the links of a chain.
The idea of monument has been questioned in Argote’s work in different pieces such as Strengthlessness (2016). The sculpture’s title refers to a state of lack of power, of impotence, and shows a droopy obelisk that supports itself limply on the floor.
More recently, in 2017, Argote showed the monument Sweet Potato at the exhibition Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice. This sculpture raises the potato to the status of an icon. Supposedly, the vegetable crossed the seas back in 700 A.D. when it left the mouth of the Orinoco River, in Venezuela, and sailed to Polynesia, where it has ever since been cultivated and eaten, and thus constitutes an example of a successful cultural incorporation. Presented like a golden meteorite, Argote’s sweet potato questions for whom, and for what, monuments serve in contemporaneity.
Reddishblue Memories
Reddishblue Memories, by Iván Argote, uses the artist's affective memories as part of an ongoing project of research and speculation based on a rumor associated with the history of George Eastman’s Kodak company, and its switch from Kodachrome to Ektachrome. This was allegedly done for ideological reasons: in the late 1960’s they realized that Kodachrome pictures turned reddish with time, and in the context of Cold War decided that the United States’ archives could not end up with the enemy’s color, and so developed the Ektachrome process, in which pictures eventually turn blue.
Entrada actualizada el el 01 sep de 2017
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