Colourful explosions, dazzling energy, lyrical movement pervaded by a force absorbing all gravity, a random harmony, and a calm dispersion – there is nothing new about that, belonging to a language borrowed from abstract expressionism. However Intimidad publica by Juliana Iriart presents the world as a canvas, and the colours do not dissolve indelibly on a surface, but in our memories, our feelings and within ourselves. Very straightforward instructions: squares cut out of coloured paper are thrown from the top of a building, recreating the magical of a firework. The role of the ‘heroic’ artist may held here by anyone, generally a friend, a friend of a friend or a small group that deploys the colours at sunset.

The art originates as a social event. First of all group energy is generated and then freed. It all starts off with smiling faces, as even before the image is produced, people are gathered side by side: watching the street down below; awaiting the signal; their hands fumbling with the paper; arms half immersed in the bags bursting with colour; childish immersion in the materials, where art is more of a sensation than an idea. In the street below, some people realise that something is going to happen, and primitive curiosity glues them to the spot, eyes expectantly raised. Meanwhile others, several minutes before the event, are oblivious to the fact that a surprise is shortly forthcoming, their feet leading them exactly within range of Intimidad publica, and those who had not anticipated seeing any art that evening, will discover that it is more the art which will embrace them with open arms.

A conversation with Maya

What about A-phan-ousia? Is it an invented concept? Yes, a-phan-ousia is an invented Greek word. It means: a – prefix negative: don’t, without. pha (n) – talk (to appear, show) ousia – essence, substance. pha means talk and phan means to appear, to show. Juxtaposed ideas produce a third one (as Eisenstein montage or the Japanese ideograms) and keep open the meanings, I mean, they don’t define or determine a close meaning. There is one poem on the London underground that always drew my attention, I don’t know in which station is displayed, but it goes like this: Stations – As he travels home on the Northern Line
he is reviewing his marriage. When he used to tell her that he loved her
it was certainly true; but now the words -though they still fulfill a useful and ceremonial
purpose – have lost some of their resonance as in Barons Court or St John’s Wood
or the beautiful Shepherd’s Bush. (Connie Bensley). It is a reminder that any expression of feelings can turn as banal as naming a popular tube station. How can words become suddenly devoid of emotional content and lose their resonance?

Progresión is as a light and airy sculpture, made ​​of wooden battens. The artist plays with the modularity and the rhythm of the wood. The work is similar to another series where the artist shows a lot of of irregular stairs (“Escalas”) which the people of Medellin use everyday. These stairs, with a sculptural form, function as the abstract for the wooden sculpture and creates a symbol of progress and effort, transcendence and the idea of surpassing oneself.

Five rocks imbued with light.
Terra Incognita consists of a mundane group of lead boulders.

Lacking in any human, emotional or sentimental context, the stones stand like strange sculptures forming an abstract installation.

The rocks are lost in the environment but are awarded a new self-worth here, in their own right. The opportunity is presented to examine and scrutinize them, as if partaking in the rock’s dream and the desire to exist for a wider audience somewhere in the world.

Rocks, fundamental elements of the Earth and humanity, are like relics of a larger whole and remind us of the fear of going beyond ourselves. They symbolise a divine mystery, the presence of matter all around us. Individually.

However, the rocks simultaneously appear to be something alien, objects from another planet, disclosing another side to human beings: the deviation, distance and alienation from the fragments. We wish to bridge this gap and to communicate with people externally. My reaction is somewhere between these emotional reactions, gently swinging from one to the other, like a hammock.

These rocks are solidly built and accessible, not spectacular, appearing more like a person which enables us to empathise.

“This is a only a test” – is the first declaration in Tamara Kuselman’s hypnotic video Plan. At first, the tone sets the audience in a state of reassurance, while at the same time washing the screen with alarming colours; deep red, cold yellow and bright orange. The effect recalls those moments of rehearsal and protocol that many children of the cold war era experienced when interludes of public alarm testing interrupted our warm attachment to the household television and its programming. It is this youthful place of confusion, assurance and discomfort that is manipulated in a very affective way by Kuselman in this bold video.

The washes of solid colours disintegrate into strange zig zags, grids and obtuse delineations of space – now appearing in tinted versions of the introductory washes—purples, peaches, pale greens and brown—form digitally flat but psychedelic renderings of the screen space. Thin grey bars appear and stretch horizontally across the screen filling it vertically. Is this signal loss in the image a further threat from the uncontrollable outside forces? The colour fields and abstractions in the film pulsate with energy and movement, evoking the history of structural moving image artists such as Paul Sharits and his flicker films.

The narration performed by the artist herself, shifts in positioning from official language to a point of view perspective of an ambiguous disaster. ‘Probably there would also be smoke’, “A woman would try to open a door by banging it”, “some glass pains would be broke” and “children have their hands over their heads”. These distressing statements are delivered in a deadpan tone and overlaid with other vocalized sounds representative of

An imagined wandering through an exhibition I have only seen in pictures:

1646, The Hague

DJ accepted the invitation from an artist-run space to have a solo exhibition. He had some clear ideas on how his next exhibition could take shape even before this invitation came. There were works scattered in his studio that always seemed to belong together; the context of an exhibition could potentially strengthen or question these connections. There were also a few ideas that had been haunting him for a while, ideas well articulated in conversations, but never materialized into a physical form.  He thought a lot about versatile objects and products in terms of sculptural material.  Such as potatoes and towels…There are so many things you can do with towels, DJ was thinking – lie on them, dry, cover or clean things, reserve seats, stop noxious gases from entering through the gap beneath a door, hold hot objects. Whereas potatoes- there are as many varieties as many uses and shapes on a global scale. What was at stake was not so much to explore new uses of an everyday object we are very familiar with, but to highlight the malleability of objects and their ability to undergo a process of transformation and manipulation that imbue them with new meanings.

How-To Take the Way Around the Workaround

DJ was thinking of a tutorial he did some time ago on 3D modeling software in which he showed the process of creating a cube following the technique of an origami with a square plane that gets folded as if it was a piece of paper. The video showed at the end that the resulting cube was exactly the same that could have been obtained through the simple click of the ‘Add cube’ command.  The cube is identical irrespective of how it is created, but watching the modeling process invites the viewer to envisage the sculptural potentiality of one of the most basic geometrical shapes.

The work chosen from arte-sur.org by Matheus Rocha Pitta, Circular (2011), did not lend itself to a presentation at the Palais de Tokyo due to its site-specific context in Rio de Janeiro. In the place of Circular, Rocha Pitta proposed and realised the production of a new work, Fist Agreement (2013).

Initiated by the remembrance of a quote from the artist Thomas Hirschorn, “To change reality you must first accept it. Agreeing with reality is the first step to changing it”, the artist Rocha Pitta associated this thinking with his research into funerary slabs from ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman culture. In these artifacts, the dead are continually depicted, in painting or relief sculpture, shaking hands or embracing the divine.

With his work First Agreement, Rocha Pitta leans two rectangular concrete slabs against the wall. Embedded within the surface of the material are images clipped from the pages of newspapers and weekly magazines, showing a series of greetings and agreements between politicians and military figures. Mirroring the poses of the funerary slabs, the figures hold hands, hug and place kisses on each other. These scenes are real events, but also staged encounters for the press. These public displays of warmth, welcoming and indeed agreement are transmitted as signs to the public that partisan alignment and cooperation is at hand in their governmental and military processes.

Matheus Rocha Pitta’s sculpture Circular is placed within the every day affairs of the Flavela de Maré in Rio di Janeiro. Commissioned for the inaugural set of projects by the contemporary art agency Traversias, the institution asks artists to consider the situation of this Favela as a site of exhibition and action—attempting to bridge the barriers between contemporary art and the economically disadvantaged community of the neighbourhood.

A run down bus is parked along the side of a road. Inside, the artist has created a series of sculptures; assembling, piling and pouring construction materials such as brick, gravel, terra cotta roofing tiles and concrete blocks, on the seats of the bus.  This eerie and still configuration of volumes alludes to the presence of the every person. This is relatable to the white plaster and bandaged figures of the American artist George Segal, who used the term ‘pedestrian space’ to describe the overshadowing of real life and sculpture.

Stayed, rough and cheap, the choice of materials by Rocha Pitta speaks to the architectural surroundings of the Favela de Maré.  Formally this choice also references the history of arte povera. Within this late 20^th century movement, artists such as Kounellis, Penone, Pistoletto and Zorio were revolutionaries in using everyday materials to speak of their political, cultural and social concerns of the post-war period in Europe. In this lineage, Rocha Pitta continues to create a bold and direct relationship between the viewer, artwork and author, when they uses everyday materials for practice. This choice is especially poignant within the context of Rio di Janeiro, as it is clearly reactionary to the major growth of material wealth within the city in the past decade.

Chance is central to most of our own lives and their winding turns. The unforeseen affects us by asking us to alter course and to adapt in relation to it.[1] As an artistic strategy, chance indicates a refusal to take an authorial position and a reinforcement of the contingent aspects in artistic production. The use of chance underlines that artistic production, its reception and meanings are never completely isolated, but subject to external decisions and interventions.

When invited to put forward a proposal for a solo show at L’Espai Dos de la Sala Muncunill in Spain (2011), Tamara Kuselman decides to suspend her personal responsibility and to surrender her practice to a fortune-teller that is supposed to formulate the content of the exhibition. The common pressure of delivering a proposal long time in advance is seemingly loosened up by the confidence in the miraculous effects of chance and unforeseen consequences of risk-taking. But is there any direction of freedom when working under instructions? Is it a relief to be told what to do or a suffocating constraint? How far can one embrace risks?

Kuselman plays out and undermines the myth of the artist taking risks and letting things to get out of her control. Yves Klein’s photomontage “jumping into the void” is a direct reference. The exhibition becomes an

When you approach the intruding precarious wall of Comunitas (Wall/Harp) you become aware of its temporariness, built and designed with functionally as its DNA . This prosthetic structure contains within its liminal space, a small harp is snugly secured in a cut out, acting as a transitory border between either sides of the wall. The architecture of the arrangement prohibits willing players to cradle the harp into their body, denying them the ability to place both hands on either side of the strings. Here Guillerme E. Rodriguez Rivera stages a rather cruel trick on the visitor. The dumbness of this pre-empted relationship, existing between the anticipation of the visitor and the potential of the situation, only appears after the sensuality of the presence of the instrument has taken its effect on its subject—like a siren calling sailors to a rocky cove.

This is a radical form of hospitality staged by Rodrigeuz, who invites you to consider an unusual way of belonging together. The work suggests that two people play a duet from either side of the wall. Without the ability to see each other, the only sensory call and response between the players comes from the sound of the instrument. Will frustration and defeat ensue if we are to choose this optimistic but naive position when approaching the equation of community and collaboration? Despite this, inherent in the work is the cynic’s core position; optimism for the small probability of good to emerge in the world. Rodriguez proposes this provocative scenario by ultimately seeing some prospect for certain players to find harmony within this obtuse triangulation.

Walk to the water’s source
And await, sitting, for the clouds to lift.
Wang Wei

Like a sentimental project lasting fifteen years thus far, Ana Gallardo’s work has centred on the revaluation and reuse of a personal heritage, hers, and of others who came forward to entrust her with certain fragments. Like Robert Filliou, for whom art was ‘what makes life more interesting than art,’ she perceives artistic creations in everyday life and emotional relationships. Art does not constitute an end in itself; its proposals apply to civil, social and political life.

The need for a narrative, be it text, sonorous or visual, or all three, like exorcism or incantation, is at the centre of her practice. Her works are marked by a very deep spirituality, in that they respect almost religiously emotions, and the objects which shelter them or have sheltered them. By appealing to memory, gathering with sensitivity these relics of intimate stories, love and exile, solitude and absence, the artist revives them, and re-educates as it were the wounded part of the memory.

The Composition study for the Lagunas de Zempoala landscape drawing is part of a project installation consisting of several drawings, a video animation and images which form the narrative of an event in the artist’s life. A text introduces the work, as is often the case in Gallardo’s work, like a cinema or theatre expository scene.