Anteriores

Images, sounds, and objects have always been linked to the human universe through ritual in diverse ways, but above all as tools for accessing our desires, from the most mundane and evident to the most mysterious and hidden. Resemblance and contagion are terms shared by both the ritual object and the work of art; aura, originality, and the power of transformation and even healing are elements common to both, and in an instant the fetish becomes a work and the work a fetish. In the relationships we establish with them, we come into contact with our superstitious, supernatural, and mystical side; believing becomes necessary in this magical operation. Rituals are direct and indirect, they influence the life processes of human beings, and they fulfill multiple functions: the veneration of deities, the rejection of negative or malevolent forces, the commemoration of special moments, connecting with beings who no longer inhabit the material world, achieving control over the body and sexual pleasures, and even raising the dead from their graves. In this way, magic and its processes, like art, transform, change, mutate, and operate through symbols, and it is in daily life where they can develop their full power. The proposals of the artists involved in this project use images, objects, and sounds alike to communicate a veiled world to us, a hidden world that does not manifest easily and must be made material for contemplation and understanding.

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 most recent works (2014 - 2016) by Manuel Bernardo Rojas are shaped from the accumulation and transformation of elements that he collects, groups, and alters through drawing, depending on his mood, the moment, and the place, as a playwright recreates imaginary beings that gather or scatter, migrating in meaning among the pages of Books colored with natural pigments, through the museum's architecture, or in wall fragments of diverse origins and contexts. Small fragments of ruins in a world full of waste that transmute into stories reassembled in the exhibition space, precariously but coherently reconstructing narrative scenes in which these different moments come into contact.

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá would not have become a reality without the generosity of the founding artists who answered the call of Fr. Rafael García Herreros to give a broader meaning to their artistic practice.

After the silence. The silence of the rifles allows us to listen to the other, to the one beside us, who has become invisible. Acceptance as multiple beings, with abilities and limitations, but inhabitants of the same living space that can be transformed into opportunities within everyone's reach.

Performance Art, or the so-called Body Arts, appeared on the national art scene in the late 1950s, as a form of protest criticizing the weight of a traditional and ossified art system, closed to new artistic practices. The goal was to transgress art's legitimized spaces, -such as the Salón Nacional de Artistas,- by staging performances as a form of attack on the system. Taking this anti-system stance as a starting point, we arrive at the institutionalization of Performance Art, which by the late 1980s had become a “museum pet”[1] and was finally accepted by art criticism[2]. Today, performance is present not only in art salons, fairs, galleries, and museums, but there are also multiple festivals and biennials dedicated exclusively to its promotion. 

The significance of a man who questions, demands, and teaches his natural rights (not those imposed by the judgments of other times and other lands), reclaims what was seized, imposed, and extracted during centuries of deceit and manipulation. The legacy of Manuel Quintín Lame's thought is manifested in questionings, demands, and teachings, mediated by the artistic, the sensitive, the reflective, and the aesthetic, from different places and ways of approaching history and understanding the present. Returning to this significance from the experience of being, as Quintín Lame explains:

Human diversity is marked by physical or biological differences and by social or cultural systems. Colombia is a country with great natural, social, cultural, economic, geographic, and climatic diversity, where there is an extensive plurality that needs to be recognized and valued.

One of the most relevant themes in the history of art has been the study of space. Great revolutions have been achieved, such as the discovery of perspective, which allowed representation in three linear dimensions, surpassing a medieval universe of only two dimensions.  At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a moment when art abandoned the mimesis of nature, physicists conceived of a curved universe and the avant-garde movements took on the task of introducing the concept of the fourth dimension: space–time, into modern art.  String theory in physics proposes that space may have ten, eleven, or twenty-six additional dimensions. 

The Soacha Art Salon is a project created by the Centro Colombo Americano, in partnership with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá, with the aim of strengthening the art scene, inside and outside the Municipality, through the dissemination and promotion of the artists' work.

The project represents a dialogue between two photographers, one based in Moscow (Ela Kinowska) and the other in Berlin (Marek Pozniak). In this case, the two photographers work together, exposing the same negative twice: Marek Pozniak in Berlin and Ela Kinowska in Moscow use the camera obscura technique without knowing what has already been exposed on the negative. The final result surprises us with images in which the two capital cities blend together so that it is impossible to tell which is which. This project opens the door not only to a dialogue between the two photographers but also invites the public to enter spaces without borders or political barriers.

Graffiti, Street Art, fanzines, stickers, posters, counterculture, art in the streets — these are the search tags visitors will find in this exhibition by the ORFANATO collective, a studio dedicated to graffiti and alternative communication for public spaces. The show invites visitors on a tour through some of the projects that the collective, over its 9 years of existence, has produced in various spaces around the city, understanding the city as a dynamic stage for the exchange of experiences and images that express unease, empathy, approval, and disapproval through actions that put forward public space as the most fitting setting for this encounter.

The selection of works presented in this exhibition was made jointly by artists and curators, with the curatorship being the product of a collective process; the joining of efforts from multiple fronts and mutual support between them make it possible to turn ideas into projects of social transformation, which is why we find it necessary to generate, collectively, forms of resistance to the loss of culture, identity, expression, and humanity.

In thinking about the final coordination, the installation process, and the opening of this exhibition which runs from July 20 to 28, parallel to the commemorations of the Independence of Colombia and Peru, this project proposes to rethink the concepts of emancipation, dependence, and independence in the recent history of both countries.

Now in its fourteenth edition, the Proyecto TESIS, which brings together the best degree projects in plastic and visual arts from across Colombia, once again sets out to explore the complex labyrinth of contemporary artistic production.

  A LINE OF DUST IN COLOMBIA (AND THE AMERICAS)