ALUNA CURATORIAL COLLECTIVE INVITES YOU TO THE CLOSING OF “GORY: NOTES FOR A RETROSPECTIVE” AND “A CHINESE, A RUSSIAN, AND A CUBAN WALK INTO AN ART SHOW”
Aluna Art Foundation is having a week full of events with the occasion of the closing of its current space located in Little Havana. On January 14, in association with Art Connection, there was a special invitation to participate in the community based ritual performance by Nina Dotti, “Take the Load Off.” January 16, at 7 p.m. will mark the final event for the exhibitions “Rogelio Lopez Marín, ‘Gory’: Notes for a Retrospective” (1975-2015) and “A Russian, a Chinese, and a Cuban Walk into an Art Show.” (Alex Yuzdon | Guo Jian | Rubén Torres Llorca) curated by the Collective.
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Rogelio López Marín, “Gory”: Notes for a Retrospective (1975-2015)
Art History is a theoretical and iconographic narrative, and its construction – and deconstruction – can and should confront the diverse modes of hegemony that dominates its discourse. This concept was vital for the conception of the exhibition “Rogelio López Marín, “Gory”: notes for a retrospective.” As such, Aluna Curatorial Collective makes a merited lengthy homage, to one of the pioneers of contemporary art in Cuba, owner of a vision that is as much personal as irreducible, and whose decisive contribution to art and photography – in the island and in the continent -, deserves to be re-dimensioned.
Composed by paintings, intervened photographs and documentary images belonging to private collections and the archives of the author, the exhibition proposes an anthological study of his work from the intersection of various strategic and conceptual instances: painting as an aesthetic exercise of existential reaffirmation; the practice of photography and the use of the archive as vehicles for articulations of new constructions about the real; and finally Rock music, as an inspiration and source of an artistic practice and a culture of resistance which questioned, in the post revolutionary context, the limitations of freedom of the individual, suggesting alternate paths in the relations between aesthetic, politics and power.
Aluna Curatorial Collective has worked with López Marín in the rescuing and re-impression of a collection of photomontages from the 70-80s, which acquire a new life thanks to the advantages of digital technology utilized in favor of respecting the nature of the traditional analogic procedure. The exhibition covers a wide historic and thematic range which include, from photographs taken in the mid-70’s, paintings from different decades, until his last and unprecedented series Still Alive, carried out in Miami in 2015.
A Russian, a Chinese, and a Cuban, Walk Into An Art Show. Alex Yuzdon | Guo Jian | Rubén Torres Llorca
The twentieth century was marked by the rise and fall of great narratives that attempted to draw near the horizon of social utopia but led to totalitarianism. Nonetheless, the epic iconography of stereotypes and collective paradigms, common in communist countries, also extended its echo to film, advertising, and the rhetoric of American propaganda during the post-war period and throughout the Cold War.
The products of this aesthetic of the heroic can be read in the 21st century, from the perspective of other codes and not a few paradoxes. Seen from the distance that time imposes, these images induce an ironic confirmation of their delusion: “History –as Lewis Mumford concludes– is the most severe critic of utopias”. But if our contemporary reading of these images of the past demonstrates their unquestionable fall, their persistence reflects the paradoxes of a present dominated by the omnipotence of capital that prevails beyond any ideology. The end of utopias did not take us to the announced end of history. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, “new walls of conflicts’’ have arisen, in the words of Slavoj Žižek. “We have arrived at a dystopian situation”, Hayden White states: “History has turned itself, into that nightmare from which we cannot awake”.
Behind the curtain of humor that Guo Jian, Alex Yudzon, and Rubén Torres Llorca overlap with those epic iconographies there is a critique of culture that not only scrutinizes the past: it opens ways to reflect on reality outside the discourse of utopias, but also outside the no less perversely manipulated fears of the present.
Nina Dotti’s performance: “Take the Load Off”
Playfulness as the principle of a collective exercise of purification is essential in the experience proposed by the artist Nina Fuentes in "Despójate / Take the Load Off". This interactive performance invites participants to a ritual cleansing conducive to beginning the New Year auspiciously: The purpose is to set ablaze those words giving name to our greatest fears and regrets that hindered our progress and stifled us from projecting ourselves with a full sense of freedom and accomplishment during 2015. This is a live work, carried through in real time and geared to reactivate the power of a simple daily practice (write upon paper what is unpleasant to us and destroy by fire the source of negative thoughts) thereby employing relational aesthetics as the proposed mode of inhabiting the world through a greater awareness of the links uniting us. The artist, who made an inaugural version of her performance in Bolivia’s Gallery Kiosco, with the participation of more than 100 women, is asking the participants to come to this new version at Aluna Art Foundation wearing a white dress.
