The fourth edition of BIENALSUR will open on July 1st at the MAR, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Provincia de Buenos Aires and will continue its activities until December in more than 70 cities in 28 countries across five continents.
"EXTRA/ordinary" is the name of the exhibition that brings together works by 21 artists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, France, Turkey, and Uruguay. It invites viewers to gaze beyond the familiar, unveiling the subversive potential of ordinary objects, questioning the canon of the everyday, and revealing a new order.
"In the exhibition EXTRA/ordinary, many aspects of our present reverberate: from environmental issues to consumerism, from care to the way in which the everyday becomes unfamiliar. A comfortable sofa with a coffee table, all neatly arranged on a carpet, is carefully sawed in half. This quasi-surgical fracture into equal halves in the work of French artist Pierre Ardouvin presents one of the thresholds of uncertainty from which the symbolic confronts us with the everyday. Its title "Democracy" expands the meaning in several directions. This is the key to the extra/ordinary, the power of symbolic production to open up new reading perspectives", says Diana Wechsler, Artistic Director of BIENALSUR.
The participating artists include Gaspar Libedinsky, Esteban Álvarez, Mariana Tellería, Delia Cancela, Liliana Porter, Amadeo Azar, Leonardo Damonte, Mimi Laquidara, Eugenia Calvo, Daniel Basso, Irina Kirchuk, Juliana Iriart and Nicolás Bacal from Argentina; French-Argentine Marie Orensanz; Regina Silveira from Brazil; Pedro Tyler and Marco Maggi from Uruguay; Olga Huyke from Colombia; Pierre Ardouvin from France; Ali Kazma from Turkey and Pedro G. Romero from Spain.
On the opening day, the piece "Biscoito Arte" with which Regina Silveira invited spectators in 1976 to literally eat her work, photographically documented and displayed in the museum, will adopt a performative dimension and the same biscuits will be offered so that the public can consume art with all their senses. The museum will feature the historic device and the documentary images of that iconic intervention.
“Not a single work has been seen in the same way as it is shown here, even if they had a previous reference, like the historic piece by Regina Silveira. Each work is re-imagined for BIENALSUR, presented in another context, with a different approach and inevitably becomes something else: therefore, you haven't seen it", says Fernando Farina, together with Florencia Battiti, curator of the exhibition "EXTRA/ordinary".
"The decentralising vocation of BIENALSUR knows neither centres nor peripheries. It makes every place a centre, and within our project the great museums of the world in which we are present have the same importance as venues far away from the large metropolises. Our goal is to reach out to the people with artistic proposals that are in keeping with the defence and promotion of the right to culture", says Aníbal Jozami, General Director of the platform that transcends the traditional theoretical boundaries of art and geography to integrate cultures and bring them closer together.
