Opening: September 10th
Visits: February 2022, from Wednesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm; from March, from Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm with previous reservation through the Museum View MUNTREF App or via email at visitasmuntref@untref.edu.ar.
We often say that in a world that builds walls, BIENALSUR seeks to overcome borders while respecting differences, in the belief that the cultural dimension is key to thinking about possible dialogues between diverse socio-political universes. In a scenario as complex as the current one, we notice that in response to the pandemic, far from the emergence of a global dialogue to coordinate actions that clear away - at least for a while - the petty distinctions between centres and peripheries, the north and the south, the rich and the poor, the world has become increasingly confined. Newspapers only cover issues of proximity, of emergency, and the news about our neighbours appears most of the time as a (tacit?) threat. But the other reality, the pre-existing reality of people without a place, of a capitalism that exacerbates differences with forms of poverty that hark back to times we thought we had overcome, not only persists but will undoubtedly worsen under the current conditions. Within this framework of extreme living conditions, we ask ourselves about the status of issues such as borders, transits, migrations, identities and how these terms are reconfigured in the current juncture. In the search for a response through symbolic production to a concrete situation such as the contemporary migratory problem, BIENALSUR encountered Together Apart and since 2017 we have converged in the pursuit of answers that go beyond the limits of the single thought. Together Apart, a project based on a specific site, Cúcuta - on the border between Colombia and Venezuela - aims to locate it “as the epicentre and standard-bearer of a process of dialogue and permanent observatory on border phenomena, highlighting the nature and identity of the city and the region, proactively placing them on the global cartography of cultural and knowledge transactions”, in the words of Alex Brahim. The convergence of ideas and the shared experience lead us to cross borders and to organize exhibitions with the aim of sharing the conditions of migration, the encounter of identities and the configuration of an “us” among the “others”. The introduction is a repertoire of radical cartographies that challenges the logic of the world. The “hot” borders - Colombia-Venezuela, Israel-Palestine, Mexico-USA - are present in the hall through the perspective of the selected artists. Poetry readings, critical gazes, visual reconfigurations are found in this curatorial narrative that has in the old Immigrants’ Hotel of Buenos Aires a privileged place for the encounter with the public. Diana B. Wechsler
Photo: Marcelo Brodsky (2019)
