Exercises to understand the world
•This curatorial proposal was presented by Tiempo Gallery for the MAPA 2024 contemporary art fair in Buenos Aires.
Exercises to understand the world is a specific proposal that brings together works by five artists from TIEMPO’s staff to build a curatorial script in relation to the method. The stand proposes the coexistence of different artistic processes that are related by their prolongation in time, their intrinsic relationship with the performative and the sustained repetition of actions in order to activate and link materiality with questions; objects with memory; body with history and other infinite combinations of all these factors.
Cecilia Nigro, Dane Palmieri, Lupe Barceló, María Villanueva and Roma Vaquero Diaz created their own systems of poetic search to rehearse vital questions about loss, the passage of time, the sacred, the cyclical, the destructive creative power of nature and, above all, the lack of answers. Curiously, the subjectivity of each one of the artists is leaked in each process, and becomes visible in the works from concrete references.
On the one hand, the familiar mold for the embodiment of memories, on the other, creatures to imagine symbolic versions of herself. Up close, the handprints that explore the strength of the earth and put it to the limit. From afar, the farewell made choreography, which materializes the imperceptible and marvelous movement of decomposition, in one case, with the body; and in the other, with painting.
Curiously enough, it is insufficient to enclose these exercises of artistic research as self-referential gestures. These methods are much more complex than they seem. Because they go beyond the reflection on identity, memory or the deconstruction of subjectivity, because in short, they are in constant dialogue with the cultural, the historical and the universal. Each of these practices tries to situate itself as part of a much larger whole that, perhaps, we will never fully understand.
Daniela Arroyo – curatorial text
PLACE AND DATE
MAPA Art Fair. Tiempo Gallery. Curated by Daniela Arroyo. La Rural, Buenos Aires. April 04 to 07, 2024.