Micro-stories of the various ways of seeing the world

03/12/2019

Until January 12, 2020, the exhibition Ways of Seeing. A curatorial essay from the collection of videos of FRACS (Regional Contemporary Art Funds, France), a series of works with diverse perspectives that condense, among other themes, that of transits and migrations, crossed by identities, social tensions and gender.

In the Art Chapel of the Universidad de las Américas Puebla, a Mexican city renowned for its colonial architecture and pre-Hispanic ceramics, the public will find works by the French Jean-Christophe Norman, Zineb Sedira, Annabelle Amoros, the Moroccan Bouchra Khalili, the Canadian Kapwani Kiwanga, the Ecuadorian Estefanía Peñafiel, the Indonesian Fiona Tan, the German Harun Farocki and the Madrid collective Democracia.


How do artists perceive the surrounding world? What views of reality do they elaborate through their artistic creations? "Sight comes before words", said the English critic John Berger, author of the book "Modos de ver", which gives its name to one of the curatorial axes of BIENALSUR 2019. 

The exhibition rehearses a series of thematic axes that are ordered, like micro-stories, in search of reviewing the different approaches that artists gathered in the FRACS collections made through their works," explains curator Diana Wechsler.

One of the conceptual nuclei that are condensed in a powerful way within this selection is that of transits and migrations, which crosses problems such as identities, social tensions, gender; topics that run through this exhibition that gathers perspectives as rich as varied. 

In addition, reflection on the resources with which artists present and re-present diverse realities is evident, enriching our approach to these ways of seeing. 


The selected videos come from the FRAC (Regional Funds of Contemporary Art) of France, a model practically unprecedented in the world -created in 1982- that seeks to bring art closer to the regions of that country through a public collection of almost thirty thousand works of contemporary art.

This nomadic heritage, converted into a large ecosystem to support art and artistic creation, is divided into twenty-three FRAC and brings together works by 5,700 artists, half from France and the other half from the rest of the world.

The exhibition in Puebla, as part of the programming of BIENALSUR 2019, supports the mission of the FRACS to facilitate the discovery of contemporary art by the most diverse public, which is also one of the central missions of the biennial, which is already preparing for its 2021 edition.