Marta Minujín and Nicolás García Uriburu protagonists of the most important events of 2017
Henrique Faria Buenos Aires gallery celebrates the presence of artists Marta Minujín and Nicolás García Uriburu in Documenta 14 Athens-Kassel and the 57th edition of the Venice Biennial respectively. Minujín and García Uriburu are linked to the gallery, which has worked intensively to put its work in the market and specialized criticism through a sustained participation in fairs and events of the international calendar.
Marta Minujín, renowned for her contributions to the pop and conceptual scene from the 1960s to the present, was invited by Adam Szymczyk (Poland, 1970), director of Documenta 14, to participate with two historical works in the two venues that the event Proposes in 2017 as a dialogue between Kassel and Athens. In the Greek capital city, the cradle of Western civilization, Minujín made a re-version of the payment of the external debt with corn, Latin American gold (1985), an action he had carried out along with Andy Warhol. On this occasion, Minujín worked with Ursula, a well-known double of the German chancellor Angela Merkel. The performance was carried out at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens under the name of Payment of the Greek debt to Germany with olive and art and had a wide coverage of the European media. Learning from Athens is the leitmotiv under which Documenta 14 gives its version of the state of contemporary global art this year. In this context, this Minujín action acquires a deep geopolitical significance given the fragile situation of the Hellenic country in the European Union.
While in Kassel, home of the prestigious event since 1955, Minujín will be present from June 10 to September 17 with a new version of The Parthenon of books that he presented for the first time in Buenos Aires in 1983, in the Days before the return of democracy. It is a icon of public art and massive, as in a structure that resembled the original Athenian building the public could approach the titles that the de facto government had banned. The work became a symbol of the recovery of civil liberties.
For the staging of Kassel worked forty people and the structure of seventy by thirty meters was lifted in just six days. To date about forty-two thousand books have been collected throughout Europe (Kassel contributes one hundred titles per week) and two thousand in Argentina. The structure has the capacity to receive about one hundred thousand volumes.
