The TESIS project reaches its 2015 edition — what does a project with such continuity mean for Colombian visual arts, and especially for recent graduates?
The TESIS project reaches its 2015 edition — what does a project with such continuity mean for Colombian visual arts, and especially for recent graduates?
For the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Proyecto Tesis has been an ongoing effort of research, innovation, and documentation, blending management, public relations, outreach, and vision.
Every year, students from more than 25 universities across Colombia, with proposals spanning every field that contemporary art encompasses today, gather in the northwest of Bogotá at a neighborhood museum that is also a university museum, to begin their professional careers in the demanding world of the visual and plastic arts.
For the museum, it means opening its doors, opening its spaces to the ever-renewing winds of youthful proposals, understanding that art is in constant ferment, in constant process; believing that the proposals of these young people, who come from distant corners of Colombia's geography with great effort and dedication, are worth exhibiting, worth encouraging, worth spreading to a much broader audience than they might otherwise reach in their home regions or in academia.
The TESIS project can be a thermometer, but also a barometer of what is happening in Colombian contemporary art. A thermometer because it measures the temperature, the ferment, the reach that certain proposals can have; and a barometer because, naturally, young people are pushing for their place and prominence on the Colombian art scene. Here, too, one feels the different forces at play between the regions and the center, a dynamic that has constantly been present in Colombian visual arts.
Contemporary art is the barometer of social processes, since it excludes none of their factors; evidence of this can be found in this year's TESIS projects, which, through installation-based practices, reflect on gender, society, inclusion, violence, monetization, the body, the city, participation, exclusion, illness, time, critique, cartography, identity, pedagogy, architecture, memory, and aesthetics.
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá is on the verge of fifty years of work, and one of its most significant projects in this latest stage, since becoming part of Universidad Minuto de Dios - Uniminuto, has been the TESIS project, as it brings together three fundamental elements of its mission: encouraging creation, disseminating research in the arts, and strengthening academic processes.
The exhibition opens on September 5 at 2:00 pm and will be open to the public until October 25.
Gustavo Ortiz Serrano
MAC Director
Artists: Eduardo González, Elizabeth Rodríguez, Jorge Escobar, Valeria Lian Lemus, Fabián Esteban Santos, David Torres, Daniela Berrío, Elena Muñoz, Beatriz Salazar, María Méndez, Pablo Acero, Lorena Tenorio, Tatiana Olarte, Leonardo Moreno, Diana Cárdenas, Freddy Lagos, Mónica Restrepo, Iván Moreno, Laura Imery Almario, Tahuanty Jacanamijoy, Colectivo Línea Amarilla, Alejandro Domínguez, Dylan Altamiranda, Ilian Sánchez, Alexandra Chávez, Juber Gómez, Eider Yangana Palechor, Cielo Ramos, Daniel Mujica, Leidy Robles, Andrés Caballero, Sebastián Delgado, Melody González, Jessica Villalobos, Aura Eraz, Marcela Calderón, Milena Soto, Karen Puentes.
Participating institutions: Academia de Artes Fábula, Academia de Artes Guerrero, ASAB, Escuela de Artes y Letras, Fundación Universitaria de Bellas Artes, Institución Universitaria Bellas Artes y Ciencias de Bolívar, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana – Bogotá, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana – Cali, Uniminuto, Universidad Antonio Nariño, Universidad de Antioquia, Universidad de Boyacá, Universidad de los Andes, Universidad de Nariño, Universidad del Atlántico, Universidad del Cauca, Universidad del Tolima, Universidad El Bosque, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Universidad Nacional de Bogotá, Universidad Pedagógica.