ALAC 2018

As a multidisciplinary artist working in installation, Carmen Argote explores notions of home and place. For her pieces, Argote was thinking about how stark and cold foldout chairs or structures can be, and how dressing them up makes them more presentable for a gathering. Coffee is a liquid that Carmen connects to through her daily morning ritual. In this work, coffee is brewed in a sequence depending on the timing of the exhibition. The idea is to create a ritual of brewing and coffee making as the work is shown -to be able to see the work and at the same time smell the freshly brewed coffee.

Otto Berchem is an American artist who lives and works in Amsterdam and Bogota. As an American artist who has lived abroad for most of his life, it is important for Berchem’s practice to create relations between centers of power and what has historically been arbitrarily assumed as periphery. With the video Inverted Americas Berchem evokes Joaquín Torres García’s 1943 drawing América Invertida, depicting an upside South America. By channeling one of Torres Garcias’ more renown contributions to modern art history, Berchem questions the notion of identity and the clichés of nationality and territory.

Sebastián Fierro’s most recent work is a reflection on memories of his first painting. He was around ten years old, when he painted a solar system on a small canvas. He wishes he had kept it, as it encapsulated a large amount of what he is currently investigating in his work: painting as a containment exercise, and as such, a tool that allows us to interiorize the world. By depicting a solar system on a finite flat surface, it becomes possible to introduce something remote and unobtainable on a small frame. What was exclusively the container is now the content.

In Manuela Viera Gallo’s pieces there is a silent fascination with destruction, and a peculiar beauty portrayed by the shattered object. In this work, fragmented and broken ceramic dishes and cups, lashed together create a serialized and overloaded sequence of ornaments. The objects look dangerous: sharp, pointed, and capable of harm, yet they hang silent and inert, proof of a violent action that has already taken place. As an immersive and sterile record, these choreographies of debris arranged in different spatial relationships disguise in their ambiguity the allusion to the abuse of women and the comfortably concealed tragedy of domestic violence on a global scale.