María José Arjona’s performance in a warehouse Bogotá, Colombia: _But I am the tiger_

This quotation, taken by Jorge Luis Borges’ A New Refutation of Time (1944-46) is the starting point for the new site specific performance of María José Arjona, enabling her to create an intriguing short-cut: time is a central issue in Borges poetics as well as in Arjona’s work, mainly focused on performance, which is par excellence a time-based form of artistic expression. The performance has been curated by Eugenio Viola and will take place in a warehouse in the Downtown in Bogotá, Colombia,

Time, consciousness, and existence are always crucial in the work of María José Arjona, who undoubtedly became, in the last years, one of the most interesting performance artist in the magmatic Latin American panorama. In her work the body has always a central place, it is a powerful element of visual communication, energy exchange and a generator of different meanings.

In Arjona’s research, the body interacts with space to create an experience, which bypasses corporeality with cognitive responses. The observer becomes the catalyst of a sensorial exchange, beyond the fluid borders situated between identity and representation. Her performative act is always based on a long time approach, by which the body becomes an agent for understanding the space-time coordinates, and to address process, memory and power.

The artist, deeply engaged with her practice, adopts strategies of resistance, investigating the government of self and others, the individual's relation to the group and the norms leading relations between the physical and the social body. Arjona conceives art as a tool of transformation; she offers an urgent response to imposed political discourses by creating an energy based structure, anchored in the body and it’s capacity for empathy with the other.

María José Arjona will perform But I am the tiger every day for one month. The piece, conceived as a long durational work becomes the object to investigate time, not in terms of endurance, but rather considering it as a tangible dimension: a matter of presence in the present time, and in a certain place. The Colombian artist through a series of repetitive, minimal acts will play with the idea of inhabiting the time and the space. She will create a situation of extended duration, to strain the relationship between artist, the viewer and the architectural space.

But I am the tiger revolves around “the” presence, the performative dimension and the perceptive experience of the viewer in concrete relationship and communion with the space. Here, the artist’s body becomes a parameter of physical self-determination meant to relate to space. A body that becomes archi-tectonic of meaning (J-L. Nancy) in a specific time and place.

In the last years the work of María José Arjona became much more complex on the visual side as well as on the relation with the space: although she is a completely “pure” performance artist, her work crosses the boundaries of specific art forms to combine different media: sculpture, installation, performance, dance and sound. In But I am the tiger, Arjona plays with the fluidity of time, providing an universe of possibilities for her body simultaneously and enabling the audience to traverse multiple sites and times. Her performance will take place during artBO, the art fair in Bogotá, in an alternative space, a warehouse located in the downtown. The curator Eugenio Viola and the artist will give a lecture on Wednesday October 30 at 7:00 pm.

María José Arjona (1973, Bogotá) is a performance artist that lives and works between Miami (USA) and Bogota (Colombia). She recently presented at the Museo de Antioquia Tiempo/ Medio, a 24 hours performance. In 2012 she started an artist in residency program at Location One (New York) and participated in two major exhibitions in Morocco (IV Marrakech Biennial) and Irregular Hexagon. In the last years she has performed in Museums and institutions around the world, including NC-ARTE Bogotá (2012); The Festival of Ideas, New Museum, New York (2011); The Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2011); MoMA, New York (2010); Madre Museum in Naples, the Biennial of Croatia (2010). In 2010 she was part of the Marina Abramovic retrospective in the MoMa New-York.

María José Arjona will perform But I am the tiger from Monday to Saturday (Sunday closed)

from 10 am to 5 pm.

“Pero soy el tigre”. Av. Caracas #15-71

Sunday, October 27 - 10:30 am

From Tuesday to Friday: 11am – 5:00 pm. Saturdays: 10am – 3:00pm