Beyond the Canon. A selection from the BIENALSUR video programme

The exhibition system, particularly museums, often chooses to crystallise objects, to keep them in a homogeneous time and space, arranging them according to criteria that anchor them to a pre-established order. Thus, caricaturistically, we can say that the objects designated for the spaces of anthropology are separated from those intended for the space of art in an attempt to control the meanings and narratives that might emerge from the combinations of such elements.

Part of the purpose of BIENALSUR is to think with symbolic productions beyond the mental constraints installed by the canon. For this reason, in seeking to expand and convolute the dimension of time imposed by canonical narratives, we take up the assertion that all art is contemporary in order to rethink from different perspectives and to situate this set of documentary videos that we have chosen to present in an artistic venue, thinking with them beyond the canon.

These documentaries can be placed between ethnography and visual studies: they shed light on socio-cultural practices, and processes of recovery, appropriation and re-signification that activate debates around concepts such as “art”, “craft”, “tradition”, “change”, “aesthetics”, “politics”, often thought of in an antinomical ways. Therefore, we believe that keeping them in parallel allows us to identify some of the terms of the dilemma about the places and uses of art and its (sustained) contemporary condition