During the month of March I was invited by R.I.C. (Residencias de Investigación Curatorial, a project initiated by curator Alexia Tala and collector Pedro Montes) to visit Santiago, Chile for one week to research the city’s cultural scene, including artists, alternative spaces, and museums. Although well aware of the perils of the flash visit and the impressions that this kind of format can produce, I nonetheless felt compelled to write a brief account of my experience in Santiago (and Valparaíso) and the conversations that ensued there. I have always been suspicious of the brief curatorial research trip and its subsequent text -a format now common among the transnational curatorial elite- fearing its inevitable becoming into a travelogue of superficial accounts and glib first impressions.

Eder Castillo: Mecánica Nacional (vista exterior) Artistas/Videos: Jason Mena: Fault Line (línea de falla), Eder Castillo: Mecanica Nacional, Karmelo Bermejo: -X, Guillermo Vargas “Habacuc”: Persona sin educación formal caminando con zancos hechos de libros apilados, Nadia Granados “la Fulminante”: La Fulminante Detonando Montreal / Cabaret Callejero, Victor Hugo Rodriguez “Crack”: Planas, Andrea Mármol: Otros Paramos / Julia, Jorge Linares: Trafico Aéreo Las [...]

Organizada em quatro seções – corpo, política, arquivo, parque - a exposição artevida, com curadoria de Adriano Pedrosa e Rodrigo Moura, incluiu uma grande quantidade e qualidade de trabalhos vindos dos recônditos do globo, com a ambição de “desenvolver conexões e leituras a partir de certas práticas artísticas do período [final dos anos 50 ao início dos anos 80], mediante diferentes conceitos, referências e enquadramentos além dos eurocêntricos”, resume o folheto da exposição.

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La importación de talentos fue exitosa en dosis triple con la iniciativa de Alexis Figueroa y su proyecto Trailer Park Proyects, quien en colaboración con Galería Roberto Paradise, presentaron el pasado jueves, 27 de septiembre de 2012 tres aperturas simultáneas: “Purple Buff” de Summer Wheat, “King’s Park” de Melissa Brown, y el solo show del primer artista residente de Trailer Park Proyects de Tim Bergstrom.[...]

My first encounter with Zoe Leonard’s work was, paradoxically, with her writing. I say paradoxically because Leonard is mostly known for her photographs and not for her writings. However, I met her work reading her 1992 piece, published for the first time in LTTR No. 5, 2006, “I want a president…”, a passionate, thoughtful and direct claim for civil disobedience and political responsibility. A commitment to humans and cities and our right over our political existence.[...]

While there exists endless research, and countless indexes and catalogs surrounding an artist’s quantifiable completed work, unrealized or half-baked utopian ideas abandoned at the worktable rarely make the cut or wander into discourse. But it’s these overtly utopian ideas—the unattainables—that would seemingly contextualize that oeuvre that comes to define the names attached to them.[...]

Marne Lucas “Aunque el sueño es un fenómeno muy extraño y un misterio inexplicable, mucho más inexplicable es el misterio y el aspecto de nuestras mentes confiere a ciertos objetos y aspectos de la vida.” Giorgio de Chirico “Las imágenes y las formas no son sino objetos secundarios y agradan o disgustar sólo en la memoria.” Francis Bacon Solemos hacernos cuestionamientos existencialistas como, ¿quienes somos?, ¿porqué somos? y ¿para qué somos? Podemos asumir que estas preguntas están fundamentadas en la falta de información en cuanto al origen de la humanidad y sobre lo que sucede cuando morimos. Ahora bien, mientras vivimos, intentamos de diversas manera encontrar el por qué a todo esto y a mucho más. Está en nuestra naturaleza e impregnado en las necesidades de vivir, el “tener”. [...]

Maja Ruznic This past August 9th as part of its monthly activities Trailer Park Proyects opened two new individual exhibitions: “Conglomeraciones Cínicas” by Ivan Girona and “Messengers” by Maja Ruznic. Both exhibitions were presented in individual trailers so as to provide each artist an individual and separate space.[...]

Javier Bosques. Nueve Policías, 48” x 56”, 35mm photo in digitial C-Print What is gained by the aesthetization of crime, politics and/or activism? In Puerto Rico, just as in many other countries around the world, many visual artists are preoccupied with the political issues at hand; not in an utopic attempt to find solutions to the problems, but rather to use art as a mirror in which, hopefully, we can see ourselves, each other and our surroundings. For Puerto Ricans, crime and politics are without a doubt an inescapable reality of everyday life. In his seminal essay on the continuous conundrum of Puerto Rican identity published in 1934 titled Insularismo, Antonio S. Pedreira  eloquently states that “since we breathe politics and live politics... we have developed an electoral attitude to measure things”[1] More than 75 years later not much has changed.[...]

“I’m certain they all thought I was a moron,” says Francisco "Tito" Rovira Rullán as we sit in his office on the second story of his San Juan gallery Roberto Paradise; his gallery manager chit-chats away loudly on the phone downstairs with her Hungarian assistant slouching behind the front desk in the heat of the unbearably sunny early afternoon. Situated in a historic wooden colonial house in Santurce, Puerto Rico, all the windows are open and a warm breeze permeates everything. The gallery director’s cigarette smoke drifts slowly towards the window and briskly cuts away down the alley towards the street.[...]

Nayda Collazo-Llorens, REVERB, Installation View. Medios y Ambientes includes the work of eight artists who use and expand notions of space to challenge the preconceived limits of objects and artistic mediums. Working in diverse techniques and media such as painting, photography, mixed media sculpture, video, architecture and installation, the work proposes the spectator relationship as a central theme by creating diverse environments of total immersion.[...]

"The body can be compared to a work of art." Maurice Merleau-Ponty Guillermo Álvarez Charvel uses a simple folding of a sheet of paper as a fundamental creative act for the composition of objects from books and documents of encyclopedic knowledge inherited from scientific rationalism and positivism which surfaced during modernity. He composes a work by a process of transfiguration that changes the form of perception, from the two-dimensional flat format of a publication on paper, to a new form with volume. The drawing gives the invisible visible existence, reveals a world resting on experience – in this case, the experience of the perceptible body in the senses through the sensations.[...]

Installation View. The Thousand and One Nights. There are times when unexpectedly an artist breaks away from a trend. Puerto Rico, an island with many creative minds but few institutional frameworks to support them, has been recently the site for works that either confront its ambiguous political situation, rather directly and simplistically, or limit themselves to trivial representations of tropical clichés and its derivative forms. It is precisely in these characteristics that this exhibition stands out. Currently an MFA candidate at the San Francisco Art Institute, Raquel Torres-Arzola, who has been working under the tutelage of her advisor artist Victor Vázquez, has put together a thought provoking and intelligent exhibition at AREA that addresses domestic as well as dogmatic power structures, but also posits sculpture as a formal and conceptual language of materials by which the intangible is materialized.[...]

Visiting artist Tim Portlock talks to La Práctica about the relationship between his work and the conventions of 19th century American painting traditions. 2012 Beta-Local is an organization and a physical space in San Juan, Puerto Rico founded in 2009 and devoted to aesthetic thought and practice. Most of what we do comes out of three main programs: La Práctica, an interdisciplinary production-based fellowship program, The Harbor, an artist residency program in support of La Práctica, and La Ivan Illich, an open school. [...]

Puerto Rican Artist Christto Sanz who currently resides in Doha, Qatar has realized his first exhibition in the Middle East. In collaboration with the South African artist Andrew Jay Weir they have developed a project that concludes with the principle idea of an extended identity. With a touch of irony and humor they present different personalities with different elements that demonstrate a shared identity between the “East” and the “West”. [...]

Rafael Miranda, participative action. “The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.” William Gibson, Pattern Recognition If we are today merely fiction, then, the narrative of life begins to unfold in the interstices of time, space and distance. Science fiction, or perhaps we should consider it just fiction, attempts to collapse the temporal space between the present and the future. [...]

Charles Juhász-Alvarado Sometimes artists do it better than curators. Oftentimes, in fact, they get right to the heart of the matter without our didactic curatorial worries. The project at Casa de los Contrafuertes, convened by Charles Juhász-Alvarado (with Néstor Barreto), shows rather than tells. It is a must-see event. Inspired by the theme set forth for this year’s Trienal Poli/gráfica de San Juan, “El Panal/The Hive,” these busy bees have enacted a hive of their own, thus affirming the curatorial premise that artists working with other artists remains a powerful and productive creative force.[...]

Topografía I Topografías I & II and Segmentario, projects by artist Adán Vallecillo, were presented last February at the ARCO Madrid art Fair, Solo Projects section.[...]

Installation view Duplicitous Storytellers is an exhibition whose point of departure posits rewriting as a conceptual strategy. A repositioning of the notion of the author— the product long-standing research on the construction of genre and figures, as well as historical and artistic movements—resounds in a dialogue among exhibition pieces.[...]

Five special projects featuring Puerto Rican artists are currently on view at the Museo de Arte de Ponce. Curated by Arlette de la Serna, Cuerpo Presente presents visually engaging approaches to the body that are not only corporeal approximations, but also expand to critical interpretations of politics, culture and spirituality. The exhibition features works by Adal Maldonado, Elsa María Meléndez, Norah Hernández and Jaime and Javier Suárez. [...]

Form Follows Function was the title of the joint exhibition of New York-based Puerto Rican artists Christopher Rivera and Hector Arce-Espasas at METRO. The works on view seemingly elude the basic premise of the phrase, identified with 20th century industrial design, architecture and Modernism, where most function seemingly defies and revolts from any real and present form. Form is then instinctive but controlled, where meaning is transgressed through process, resignification and the reconciliation of binary opposites. As many contemporary artists, both Rivera and Arce-Espasas create fictionalized realities, where form is not only an aesthetic choice but also a conceptual one.[...]

Form Follows Function was the title of the joint exhibition of New York-based Puerto Rican artists Christopher Rivera and Hector Arce-Espasas at METRO. The works on view seemingly elude the basic premise of the phrase, identified with 20th century industrial design, architecture and Modernism, where most function seemingly defies and revolts from any real and present form. Form is then instinctive but controlled, where meaning is transgressed through process, resignification and the reconciliation of binary opposites. As many contemporary artists, both Rivera and Arce-Espasas create fictionalized realities, where form is not only an aesthetic choice but also a conceptual one.[...]

Hannes Zebedin: Political Minimalism at AREA This past November AREA: Lugar de Proyectos invited Austrian artist Hannes Zebedin (Lienz, 1976) to take up residence in AREA’s exhibition space in Caguas, Puerto Rico,  where he created a series of site-specific minimal interventions resulting from first-hand observation and investigation (through casual conversations) of the island’s political and socio-economic climate. Zebedin, a seasoned traveler, is often invited to international spaces and institutions to create temporary interventions that respond to particular political contexts, redefined and interpreted through the discerning eye of the ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger.’ In this particular context, Puerto Rico’s elegantly worded yet ambiguous political status figured predominantly in Zebedin’s work.[...]

Hey there! Below you can find the catalogue essay for the exhibition The Dialectic City: Document | Context that closed last November at Laboratorio de Artes Binarios. Enjoy! -Carla Acevedo-Yates “To capture a city in an image means following its movement.” Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant The city is comprised of colliding elements; conflicting mechanisms that through [...]