Gala Berger

Villa Gesell, 1983

A tea room open for conversations, where each artist created their own special flavor for sale; a gallery called Inmigrant, to provoke the Argentineans who don’t consider themselves locals, but “European immigrants”; a museum allocated to a tiny space whose entire collection is saved on a HD, complete with instructions on how to assemble each work. These are the spaces created in conjunction with fellow artists and curators by Gala Berger, an artist who allies art with public, political and collective actions of ambiance-building. Her projects aim to support the work of contemporary artists in Argentina and obtain a poetic that is more engaged with political issues.

The possibilities of moving between art and institutional criticism are the conceptual basis of Berger’s projects, certain that there is no real difference between the alternative and the mainstream. In practices geared towards the organization of spaces and works, she presented Cipher (2014), a curatorial proposal for the collection at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery in Buenos Aires, unveiled in the gallery’s car park. In the performance La montaña que come hombres [The man-eating mountain] (2017), held at the Museo Histórico de Villa Gesell, she incremented the institution’s history with some documents on the city’s Bolivian population, fundamental to its construction and yet invisible in its “imaginary”.

In this second edition, the Triennial takes one further step toward building its identity and stating its presence on the Brazilian and international contemporary art scene. As a recent creation with a brief history, the event did not yet have an entry on Wikipedia, something Berger was able to rectify with a fictional but perfectly credible Frestas—Arts Triennial page with links to and direct mentions of key issues from the fateful year of 2017, in which the Left and human and civil rights found themselves under threat from an ascendent Right. By inventing story-fictions for four editions (not just two, as happened so far), Berger identified possible encounters and conflicts between art and politics in an uncertain present and future under (de)construction.

[J.A.]