A REFLECTION ON HOW WE RELATE TO NATURE AND TECHNOLOGY - VIDEO PROJECT & SCULPTURE GARDEN

Sculpture Garden

This section brings together the work of young artists who reflect on the relationships between open space, nature, landscape and architecture, as a response to the same spatial characteristics of the section, presented in the front garden of the Casa Prado.

CURATORIAL TEXT – by Max Hernández Calvo

Casa Prado’s Garden recreates, on a very small scale, a mountains and lake landscape (including a grotto and a Virgin Mary image) that dialogues with the house’s architecture. Taking this peculiar location as the starting point, the Sculpture Garden brings together the work of thirteen artists who reflect on the complex relationships between two opposing concepts: the natural and the cultural, the artisanal and the industrial, the findings and the constructed, the intentional and the accidental, which, nevertheless, suggest that they are part of the same continuum.

Álvaro Icaza and Verónica Luyo (Galería Crisis) trace a tour of the garden through sounds that evokes whistles and birdsongs. Santiago Roose (Galería Puro) works as a totem that summons our anxieties about nature. Karlo Andrei Ibarra (Galería Vigil Gonzáles) reworks the Virgin Mary image as a religious and cultural figure in which revelation, message and indoctrination converge. Ana Cecilia Farah (O’Art Project) confronts the industrial, the natural, the organic and the inorganic by intervening classic art forms. Antonio Ballester (Galería Pedro Cera) articulates the natural and the artificial in the image of a river. Gwladys Alonzo (Revolver Galería) associates art and waste with construction processes and materials. Los Carpinteros (LGM Galería) allude to industrial waste and manual labor by recreating a rusty nail. Illiana Scheggia (La Galería) refers to the past, present and future with its forms and materials. Elena Damiani (Revolver Gallery) creates a cut in chronological, geological and human time in three dimensions. Sol Bailey Barker (Now Gallery) associates the industrial and the ancestral under a totemic form. Vivana Balcázar questions the standard forms of public space by parodying its emblematic elements. Kinshiro Shimura ironizes the illusions of the present with realistic forms on the verge of the absurd.

Participating artists with their works: Karlo Andrei Ibarra (Vigil Gonzáles Gallery);

Santiago Roose (Puro Gallery); Ana Cecilia Farah (O'Art Project); Álvaro Icaza & Verónica Luyo (Crisis Galería); Illiana Scheggia (La Galería); Sol Bailey Barker (Now Gallery); Gwladys Alonzo (Revolver Galería); Elena Damiani (Revolver Galería); Antonio Ballester (Pedro Cera Gallery); Kinshiro Shimura (no gallery); Vivana Balcázar (no gallery).

Video Project

Seeks innovative and immersive proposals that work with the moving image. On this occasion, the theme revolves around the posthuman, the environment and the relationship between humans and nature.

CURATORIAL TEXT – by Irene Gelfman.

In recent years, the boundaries between the human and the non-human definitions have come under tension. We are facing a cultural shift that proposes a horizontal relationship between species. Contemporary art has become a fertile ground to highlight and introduce issues about how our ways of seeing, perceiving and thinking about the relationships between nature, humans and things have been (re)configured.

The exhibition proposes a dialogue between the works of Rocío Gómez, Donna Conlon, Samuel Domínguez / Elise Guillaume, Katherinne Fiedler, Ernesto Leal, Maximiliano Siñani, Lorena Noblecilla, María Laso Geldres and Fernando Nureña Cruz, and invites us to reflect on the power of images to envision a habitable future. The galleries are transformed into a post-anthropocentric and post-human proposal where our ways of thinking and being in the world are strained.

Upon entering the rooms, the viewers will enter a situation that seeks to take them out of the everyday context through works that mediate between the digital world and the analog world, and between pieces that somehow create experiences of longing for the natural. Each image can awaken memories of landscapes and sensations forgotten by a planet on alert and motivates to glimpse a horizontal and integral world that does not distinguish between humans and non-humans.

Selected videos:

Donna Conlon, From the Ashes, 2019.

Rocío Gómez, Promises written in ice. 2022.

Samuel Domínguez & Elise, Guillaume Chajnantor - Place of Departure. 2021.

Katherinne Fiedler, Inhabiting. 2022.

Lorena Noblecilla, Aracne / Change of skin. 2022.

Ernesto Leal, Letter.

Maximiliano Siñani, Apacheta n9. 2022.

María Laso Geldres, Historia de una Guagua. 2016.

Fernando Nureña Cruz, No tomorrow without yesterday. 2016-2017.

Max Hernández Calvo is an independent curator and art critic. Among his recent curatorships are the retrospective of Alberto Borea "Arqueologías del presente y poéticas de la ciudad” (Archaeologies of the present and poetics of the city), co-curated with Adriana Tomatis; and the retrospective of Fernando Bedoya, "Artist in Residence" (both 2022). He recently published the book "El mañana fue hoy. 21 años de videocreación y arte electrónico en el Perú" (Tomorrow was today. 21 years of video creation and electronic art in Peru), co-edited with José-Carlos Mariátegui and Jorge Villacorta (2018).

Irene Gelfman. Graduate and teacher of Middle and Higher Education in Arts (FFyL - UBA); she attended the # 11 Artists Program at UTDT (Critic and Curator). She is the winner of the first prize New Curators of the AMALITA Collection and the Argentine Association of Art Critics. She works in curation, management, and art criticism. She is the founder and director of Minerva Universos Visuales, an art studio focused on the dissemination of Art History content for diverse audiences, giving a clinic for artists and consulting for cultural projects. She writes for various media, publications and catalogs (Otra Parte, Colección de Artistas, among others). With more than seven years of experience in different areas of cultural management, both public (national and local) and private (foundations and NGOs), she coordinates and produces content. In addition, she put together the programming in areas such as theater, visuals, and music for different festivals, fairs, and international events in which Argentina was invited as a guest country. She developed and coordinated an aid program to promote Argentine artists abroad (APEX-Ministerio de Cultura Nación) and was a strategic advisor for the Barrios Creativos program.