Work of NICOLAS GARCIA URIBURU presented curator by Rolando Joshua Carmona

Born in Buenos Aires in 1937, Nicolás García Uriburu participated in the international neo avant-garde movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s as a pioneer of land art and ecological art. On June 19th 1968, he dyed the waters of Venice’s Grand Canal green with a fluorescent dye called Fluorescein. The action, created with occasion of the 34th Venice Biennale but not as part of its official program, aimed to bring attention to the relationship between nature and civilization and to promote ecological consciousness as a critical part of culture. Fluorescein is a manufactured organic dye developed by NASA for scientific purposes and is ecologically harmless. Garcia Uriburu’s action transformed the landscape of the Italian city for the course of the day, with its waters fluorescent green until the low tide made the dye gradually disappear. Besides recording the event with film and photography, the artist kept a group of bottles of the colored water as a testament to his artistic intervention.

OLIVIA McGILCHIRST

Thank you Anna for posing for this image, inspired by Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things are" (1963)

These single images are inspired by the fantastical elements within ordinary life found in children’s tales old and new. Within these intricate settings, a lone figure hovers in a frame rich with suggestion and mystery. The confined surroundings are an ambiguous stage in which the isolated characters are a visual trigger for a plethora of possible stories.

OLIVIA McGILCHIRST From the series 'Arrested Reality': photographic tableaux, c-type prints, dimensions variable (2009).

AL-OTHMAN created an intervention in an old city in AL-Ula to instill a renewed notion of its remarkable architectural style. Al-Othman covered the entire building with tin foil in a symbolic gesture to its frozen state, making a statement about the absurdity of thinking that the cycle of change could ever be stopped. As the old saying goes, change is the only constant thing in life.

ABDULLAH AL-OTHMAN, Heart Catheterization, 2018. Site-specific installation.

Currently on display in Al-Ual ‘Heart Catheterization’ by ABDULLAH AL-OTHMAN.
The installation is part of '#WinterAtTantora' exhibition.

GUSTAVO GENTA presented by PAOLO CAMPOCHIARO.

Poor art as local identity and universal language
Lately, we often hear or read that a break was necessary, that we could no longer live according to the model in which we were operating.
Like the vast majority of people, regardless of their professions, I wonder what we really want to change and what is the emotional and material price we are willing to pay to bring about change.
I have my doubts about the artist's need to express himself in any other way than through his work. In any case, in the world of art, all expressive variables coexist as a form of identity, and it is right that they do.
I believe that the artist's place in this moment of dystopia is that of reflection, silence and production.
The time will come to assume a political position by action or omission and perhaps that will be the greatest responsibility of the Artist in the world of tomorrow.
The Rio de la Plata, where I come from, has a long tradition of construction in a formal and fun aspect.
The construction of form, content, language and silence, the construction of the toy and the work of art are part of the Uruguayan culture and the vernacular artist.
These days I keep thinking that... the crisis we are experiencing highlights the failures of the system, of the functioning of our societies in philosophical, moral and quantitative terms.
Following a logic of war, since it is the vocabulary used by the "great men" who lead us, I am interested in the foreground in knowing what is the enemy's strategy.
Is the "normality" in which we used to live the actual problem ?
Can reality be changed using the tools of war provided by the enemy?
Can an artist without any tool build his work ?
Therefore, we, art professionals as a whole must think and propose new ways of interaction, since it is within us that the reality of a devastated post Covid-19 economy will manifest itself. The door is open and it is up to us to make the decision to go through it in pursuit of structural change.

GUSTAVO GENTA, Untitled, 2018, mixed media.

Artist JELILI ATIKU is talking about a biological warfare

Artist JELILI ATIKU is talking about a biological warfare.
On the hold on COVID 19 pandemic, we all have suddenly become vulnerable! On March 17 2020, I had expressed an opinion and asked
question, “Is Coronavirus a Biological Warfare?”1. Five days after (March 22 2020), Ravideep Singh posted a video on YouTube with the theme, “CIA Arrested China Scientist for Creating Corona Virus”.2
 It seems difficult for the world to accept that COVID 19 is Biological Warfare; but on a critical observation it is and painfully it is a disaster. It is a struggle of capitalist power holders aiming at controlling the world economies. Incidentally, in 2014, I began in subtle way envisioned the consequences of capitalists’ power struggle and thus direct the attention of the world towards the dire effects on humanity through my performance, Ologbere (Oginrinringinrin II)”3.  Ologbere
Was first enacted at the International Performance Art Festival PALS (Performance Art Links), Slussen /Södermalmstorg and Fylkingen Stockholm, Sweden on April 27 2014; and secondly at Centre National de la Danse, Pantin, Northeastern Paris, France on Wednesday May 16 2018 during the Seminar, Cosmocides: art(s), violence, 21ème siècle; the catastrophes that nuclear weapons states, United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France andChina would likely have caused the world. Oh!  The powerholders are gradually emerging as the greatest challenge to our world!

SAM HEYDT,  Works and Comment
The edge is closer than we think, but illusion won’t free us from reality, even as the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history and the myth of progress continues to perpetuate inequality. Globalization has moved forward unevenly and no-one can say where this "New Frontier" is leading us. As the natural world is liquidated and substituted with an artificial one, the social landscape becomes increasingly fractured and alienated.  No longer in focus, all grand narratives dissipate in the space of post-history, as technological dependency diminishes the tangibility of our experiences. The medium has swallowed the message.  Our time is marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic and climate change. As the vices of the first world burden the third, the skeletons of old factories serve as caveats of growing inequality. The silent landscape a symptom of a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line.  Political dissidence is drowned out by the white noise of the media, as it sedates the social psyche with empty promises it proposes for the future it truncates.
Working across different media- film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text, Heydt presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built on it.  Conflating time and place, her layered imagery collides, merges and disrupts logical relationships between occurrences. Through adding and subtracting meaning by combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream, Heydt confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for.

SAM HEYDT, Lady Liberty (2020) Mixed Media Work, 40 x 32”, Entrenched thoughts 20 x 20”, Highway trenches 20 x 11", Disney 18 x 20"

BERTILLE BAK's artwork is proposed and commented by Collectors FRANCOISE and JEAN-CLAUDE QUEMIN.

LES COMPLAISANTS (The Complacents) explore the idea of journey based on the evocations from the navigation, from the ways and the people who carry out activities related to the sea. During a residency in Saint-Nazaire, a French transit port for large merchant vessels, Bertille Bak was employed at a Sea-men's club in order to be in close contact with the workers disembarked from the vessels. Thus the artist could meet hundreds of seafarers and know a world made of rituals and traditions, of loneliness and exploitation. Drawing on a practice narrated by the seafarers themselves, who use their own hair to create marquetry works as a pastime, Bak collected locks of hair from the seamen she met to create a series of 37 marquetry works representing flags of convenience, that is the flags of nations where ship owners register their merchant ships, different from their home country. An option granted to ship owners who allows the practices of tax evasion and minor obligations regarding the working conditions of the crew members. During this long covid19 confinement, will you use your hair to create art?

BERTILLE BAK (born 1983) is a French artist whose work concerns two characteristics : a social analysis of the communities of people she becomes interested in, and with whom she shares everyday stories and cultures, with a view to understanding their world and representing it through the tools offered by art itself (video being one of her favorite medium); and the search for utopia, irony, lightness and the sense of humour that characterize her art-making process and that push it to go beyond the simple social observation.

BERTILLE BAK, Les Complaisants, 2014, hair marquetry, metal frame, 17x22,5cm. Collection Quemin.

Artist LOUISE PRESSAGER comments on her drawing.

I made this drawing a few weeks ago, when I was not yet aware that we would soon be confined. For me it was a reflection on the shadow of anonymity and the light of notoriety. I watched a lot of reality shows when I was younger ... When I look at it today, I can't help but think it was a failed act and that I was already thinking about the health crisis we are going through. In this sense, my vision is optimistic: the caterpillars that we are now will turn into butterflies one day !!

LOUISE PRESSAGER, "Technicolor", 2020. Encre sur papier, 60 x 80 cm.

FRANCOIS TROCQUET is proposed by CAMILLE FREMONTIER and ROBERT MURPHY, text by ALEXANDRE MARE.

At first glance, they are buildings, houses, strange complexes, city architecture, suburban areas, street lamps and electric wires. A cemetery. An infinity of signs that tell of the extension of the peripheries: architectures that seem isolated, or rather disconnected, from the urban concentration of the major centres.
No characters in these houses, in these buildings, no children in the alleys. Not even dogs, cats or foxes who have ventured out. No birds in these too-white skies. No nothing at all. And, one could find in Rohmer's testimony some leads to enter a little more into Trocquet's drawings: "confronting life and architecture, habits and urbanism. There was a real fictional subject and a staging issue." A space where the new, modern city "serves as a laboratory for an experiment, a utopian space where fiction and characters can develop without hindrance. "(Excerpt from ALEXANDRE MARE's Format Paysage)

FRANCOIS TROCQUET draws. six ballpoint pen drawings, 2020, 100 x 75 cm each