The former Buenos Aires Central Post Office is once again home to BIENALSUR with three exhibitions that investigate mass culture, dominant historical accounts and environmental problems and include the participation of about 20 artists from Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Austria, Portugal and Spain.
On Wednesday, November 10, at 6:00 p.m., on the 5th floor of the Centro Cultural Kirchner, the video installation The green light (photo) by the young Saudi artist Ahaad Alamoudi and curated by the Artistic Director of BIENALSUR Diana Wechsler, will be shown, with axis in the ways in which information is shared and at the same time constitutes us as subjects in society.
Born in Jeddah in 1991, Alamoudi is one of the 20 artists whose works BIENALSUR will present at the Kirchner in different stages from November 2021 to February 2022. The young woman grew up between England and Saudi Arabia, graduated from Dar Al Hekma University from Jeddah with a BA in Visual Communication in 2014 and an MA in Engraving from the Royal College of Art in 2017. Many of her photographs, videos and installations aim to alter the historical interpretation of Saudi Arabia. She has exhibited in different cities around the world such as Sharjah, London, Venice, New York, Miami, San Francisco and Lewiston, among others. Within the framework of BIENALSUR 2021, she participates in the collective exhibition Ecos. A world between the analog and the virtual, which inaugurated on October 15 in the Jax District of Riyadh and will also open on November 30 at the Qasr Khuzman in Jeddah. Her work at the CCK will be available until December 10.
"Her gaze focused on the processes of constitution of identities is symbolically displayed in this work through a complex dynamic of lights that are activated in relation to the voices that come from a choir of men who sing an Arabic pop song. In it, the lyrics are repeated over and over again: 'No, no, don't leave us, we were always with you / No, no, don't leave us, even if we weren't with you'. Assuming a parodic character, nuances given by the inflections of the voice are presented, the ways in which the intensity of some words is modified or sentences are cut, and to this is added the proxemics, the camera shots, subtly altering the message, beyond the fact that it is always the same. Each voice is identified with a unit that is built and rebuilt as the light turns on and off. The messages remain latent and, as the lights go on, the messages are broadcasted again. The work generates a hypnotic immersion that sends us back to thinking about one of the complex issues of our present on a global scale referring to information: the ways in which messages are transmitted, attention is captured and positions are sought", Wechsler points out.
A week later, on Thursday, November 18 -also at 6:00 pm- the exhibitions Transfer, made up of two videos by the Austrian Gernot Wieland and curated by the Argentine Leandro Martínez Depietri, and From the Wound, curated by the Spanish Virginia Roy with productions by female artists who investigate the multiple fissures present in our societies, will be added to BIENALSUR’s Km 1,3. Gernot Wieland was born in Horn in 1968. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he currently resides. His works have exhibited at the Salzburger Kunstverein, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Kassel Kunstverein, the Graz Kunsthaus and the Liverpool Biennial, among others. He has received awards such as the EMAF Media Art Award 2019 from German film critics.
"A critical exploration of the limits of psychoanalysis and psychiatry encourages Gernot Wieland's audiovisual collages in which the habit of saying 'I' is confronted with a radical empathy for living beings and the landscape. A curious look at cruelty and the strangeness of the world is articulating possible answers to two questions that define his work from a childish insistence: What do we see? What do we want to see? His narratives operate on present, past and future as if these were caked layers of a plasticine to the one that slowly molds with images, words and silences that shape absurd creatures born from the incestuous cross between memory and fiction. The Grimm Brothers' story 'The Town Musicians of Bremen', the script for 'The Birds' by Hitchcock and the mythical Guaraní figure of El Pombero are some of the fables of an animal world on which Gernot projects new human stories ranging from the autobiography to the Austrian history. The exhibition’s title plays with the affective networks that he draws from the Freudian notion of transference, understood as the repetition of traumatic experiences of childhood in the bonds of the present, but extending it to relationships with non-human agents. This selection of videos –which includes a work commissioned by BIENALSUR: Bird in Italian is uccello– responds to these vital stories of crossed paths between different species, landscapes and objects that share a collective unconscious. Through them, Gernot emphasizes the possibilities for a posthuman ethic, which are already present in popular culture and which open ways within the nonsense to which the belief of man as the center of the universe has led us”, explains the exhibition’s curator.
For its part, the exhibition curated by Roy, in which the Spanish Lúa Coderch, the Chilean Cecilia Vicuña, the Peruvian Claudia Coca, the Portuguese Grada Kilomba, the Argentine Graciela Sacco and the Mexican Tania Candiani, among others, “addresses the idea of injury as a place of reflection and vindication, and presents its condition of vulnerability as a strength for the struggle. The proposal urges us to listen to the multiple open wounds that pierce us and challenge us as a community. Those that ooze from our texture and epidermis: social, colonial and gender tears; racial, historical and environmental fractures, whose cuts and scars pierce us and nail us in this world".
Transfer and From the wound can be visited free of charge from Tuesday to Sunday from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. until February 13, 2022.
The projects presented at the Centro Cultural Kirchner, Km 1.3 of BIENALSUR, have the support of the Secretary of Cultural Heritage of the Ministry of Culture of the Nation. Alamoudi's presentation is supported by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture. And Gernot Wieland's, by Phileas.
