“PUPILA”, A REFLECTION ON THE LOOK´S POWER
Pupila is the ambitious individual exhibition that the Argentine artist Eduardo Basualdo (Buenos Aires, 1977) has developed especially for the Modern Museum in dialogue with its director Victoria Noorthoorn, with whom he has already collaborated in the past, and especially for the Pontevedra Biennials (2006) and Lyon (2011).
This is the first large-scale project that the artist presents, in a long time, in a public museum in Argentina after international milestones such as his participation in the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2014, in the Venice Biennale in 2016, or his current exhibition at the Hamburgher Banhoff museum in Berlin.
Through Pupila, Basualdo invites viewers to take an imaginary journey through the depths of the human mind. Shared, through dozens of drawings, his recent research on the power of the gaze as a constituent action of the process of human development, but significant, as a performative action and, therefore, transforming life -or more specifically, of human relations-. How is the sea that inhabits us? Who swarm our abysses? How to view these images? In Pupila, the artist shares his extensive research process, referring to "It's a process that everyone could do!" and invites the public to a fascinating introspective journey. It is the journey of the images that parade through the artist's mind when he seeks to evoke and understand the experiences of the past and present.
Major catastrophes have the ability to undo the walls, or membranes, that separate one person from another and the inner world from the outer. The artist's eye turned outward to contemplate the same figures that until then had barely nested in his nightmares in the recesses of his imagination, as if the caverns of the brain could no longer contain that malignant boil. And he understands at that moment that these images do not belong entirely to him, that they arise from the atavistic background of all the preceding generations that, in the wake of their desperate migrations, left us as a legacy the foam of their terror.
The inability to know where one is looking brings the most insidious of torments. To get out of this unreality, the artist lowers it to paper: he traces, with ink, pencil or charcoal, signs that will not be erased before being deciphered, like what is written in the water of dreams, traces that can be looked at and looked at again. , and that others will perhaps also look at, and understand even better than he does. A call knocks on the door from the future. The reward will not be the awakening from the nightmare, just the tiny and precious ability to distinguish what is a nightmare from what is not.
Curatorship: Victoria Noorthoorn, with the collaboration of Alejandra Aguado and Clarisa Appendino
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