Berlin, 1978. Lives between Berlin and Leipzig

In November 1995, the BBC broadcast an interview which the journalist Martin Bashir conducted with the most photographed woman on the planet at the time, the lady about whom the world couldn’t know enough. About an hour into their conversation, she revealed what she hoped for the future, her husband and the monarchy. It was the last-ever interview with Diana Frances Spencer, the Princess of Wales.

“I felt compelled to perform. Well, when I say perform, I was compelled to go out and do my engagements and not let people down and support them and love them.” Thirteen years later, the artist Yvon Chabrowski appropriated those lines from the interview and reenacted them in an aseptic environment featuring only a tripod, a chair and the character, played by the actress Jana Horst, in casual dress.

Throughout her career, Chabrowski has challenged the image by placing notions of the legitimacy, truth and possibilities of representations in check, especially through experiments with performance and reenactment that gauge and mediate reactions, understanding just how thoroughly a reproduced image still depends on the medium that created it. Can any experience ever be totally new? Can an image outlive its context? And, if so, there is something to be gained from that.

[U.C.]

Munich, 1963. Lives in Berlin

With his formative years set against a Cold War backdrop, the photographer experienced the drastic processes of spatial, social and cultural transformation his country has undergone, all of which has honed his perception of time and historical recovery. Armed with large-format cameras, Michael Wesely began experimenting with overexposure in long-duration analogical photographic processes that enabled him to capture images that accumulate the movements, agents, passages, disputes and processes typical of the contemporary city, whether in Germany or abroad. Between 1997 and 1999, the artist documented the reconstruction of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. In addition to depicting the square itself, the images also register what would become its defining characteristic, accentuating the ever-changing cityscape.

Familiar with Brazil’s urban reality and the local political context, at Frestas Wesely presents four photographs from a series taken on April 17, 2016, the day the Chamber of Deputies voted in favor of opening impeachment proceedings against former President Dilma Rousseff, elected in 2014 and ousted from office in August 2016. Taken digitally, but using overexposure with large-format cameras and very sharp lenses, the artist photographed street rallies at two traditional gathering spots in São Paulo: Vale do Anhangabaú, downtown, where an anti-impeachment protest took place; and Paulista Avenue, where a pro-impeachment rally was held. The photographic result symbolically captures the democratic schism and political crisis currently assailing Brazil. Among haphazard overlappings and smeared movements, the artist conveys a historical moment that will take many years to assimilate.

[D. M.]

Cidade da Guatemala, 1974. Lives in Viena

Many of Sandra Monterroso’s objects, installations, performances and videos derive from a process of rapprochement with her genealogy and, in particular, with the women of her family. Like other artists of her generation, she belongs to a movement eager to recognize Guatemala and its indigenous roots, something long hampered by the civil war that raged from 1960 to 1996. This reappropriation of the local history and culture appears to be a form of resistance to the colonial legacy and the intensifying effects of global capitalism.

The work Columna vertebral y los rumbos cardinales [Vertebral Column and the Cardinal Points] is symptomatic of a return to traditional autochthonous knowledge and crafts. In this as yet unfinished project the artist endeavours to track down lost relatives, spend time with them and collect their traditional skirts. When these garments are folded and stacked they form not only a backbone, but a monument to her family, its traditions and the memories handed down through the generations. The artist hopes to erect five such columns, each in a specific colour and corresponding to one of the cardinal points of the Mayan cosmic cross. At Frestas, she presents two of these columns, one red and the other yellow, corresponding, respectively, to the east and south. Ties to her origins also feature strongly in Gestos decoloniales en polvo rojo [Decolonial Gestures in Red Dust], an installation made up of seven canvases covered in annatto, on which images are projected of the artist painting her own face with the same red powder, which in ritual contexts can symbolise the blood of one’s forebears.

[O.A.]

Ibiza, 1986. Lives in Madri

What makes a place become a popular tourist spot and part of the entertainment industry? How, in the process, do these places mould themselves into an image of made-for-export exoticism? What are the effects of assuming an identity fabricated to meet the expectations of foreign visitors? These are some of the questions that lie at the root of Irene de Andrés’ work.

In the project Donde nada ocurre [Where Nothing Happens], the Spanish artist explores the history of five abandoned night clubs in her native Ibiza. The clubs were founded in the late 60s, early 70s, when the island first became famous for its beaches and thriving nightlife. At the Triennial, the work Heaven revives the ambience of one of these former hedonistic dens, named as “paradise”. Abstract engravings reproducing the ephemeral configurations of laserdisc lighting seem to call attention to the leading role light plays in such environments. A videoinstallation runs through photos of the parties hosted there, from the most recent to the oldest. The editing presents a fragmental panorama every bit as disrupted as the history of the joint itself, which went through countless closures and changes of name and owners over the years. Other photographs show this erstwhile hotspot of celebration and ecstasy in its current state of ruin, reflecting the inescapable failure of any attempt to deliver on the promise of paradise, whether by a discotheque or Ibiza itself.

[O.A.]

Munique, 1996. Lives in Berlim

In essays, conferences and audiovisual installations, Hito Steyerl reflects on the conditions of production, circulation and consumption of images in the age of globalized media. Her analyses underscore the intricate connections between the art field and international economic and geopolitical interests. Based on extensive research, Steyerl associates images and data from a range of sources, many of them first-person narratives that evince these cloaked and complex relations between politics, culture and technology.

Guards is structured around interviews with two museum security guards who talk about their work and their previous careers in law enforcement and the military. In the halls of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of these guards demonstrates the gestures and attitudes to be adopted should a suspicious individual be detected at the museum. At a certain juncture, videos depicting the general context of urban crime and even armed conflict are inserted into an environment designed to house works of art. The substitution of artworks with these images, the simulation of security response action, and the cordons used to keep viewers at a safe distance from the works suggest the conception of art as an easy target or, to paraphrase one of the artist’s own creations, “the museum as a battlefield”. In this manner, Steyerl seems to draw a parallel between the means of control and surveillance used to protect artistic heritage, on the one hand, and the nation, on the other.

[O.A.]

Paris, 1961

The work of the photographer Denis Darzacq questions the construction of what we understand to be “normal” through the standardization of tastes, ideas and attitudes. As such, it challenges the limits of a constrictive homogeneity by highlighting the potential that emerges from ethnic and social minorities, or from people with physical or mental disabilities. The artist delves into the roles the individual and alterity play in a society that ignores difference in favor of a normatization of bodies and behaviours grounded in hegemonic ways of living and socializing.

In the series Hyper, Darzacq invited youths to perform street-dance moves in a hypermarket. Photographed in mid-air, these youths seem to float effortlessly, defying gravity in one of the most emblematic spaces of mass consumption. Taken not long after the 2005 riots in the outskirts of Paris, the inertia of the dancers’ bodies seen against the packed shelves suggests rebelliousness and a desire for freedom from the established order.

The series Doublemix, which the artist is also presenting at the Triennial, captures the uncanny cohabitation of two apparently distinct realities: the artist’s photographs juxtaposed with the earthenware objects of Anna-Iris Lüneman. The strange and intrusive presence of these abstract sculptures seems to jar with the possible meanings and narrative potential of the photographs, conjuring a hybrid space between the pixel and glazed clay.

[O.A.]

São Francisco, 1973. Lives in Londres

Daria Martin’s oneiric, synesthetic videos take bodily sensations and unconscious perceptions and make them almost palpable. Working with choreographers, musicians and actors, the artist pinpoints convergences and continuities between distinct artistic disciplines and invites different perceptions of what it means to be the spectator. Shooting on 16 mm film, his works often evoke the Utopian ideas and aesthetics of the modernist vanguards. The artificiality and theatricality of the situations he stages, however, induce reflections on film as a potential purveyor of fantasies, dreams and illusions.

In In the Palace, the 1932 Alberto Giacometti sculpture Le Palais à 4 heures du matin [The Palace at Four in the Morning] is reconstructed on human scale as a real stage for choreographies inspired by the history of modern dance, from the Ballets Russes and Oskar Schlemmer to the Martha Graham dance company. The bodies seem motionless before the structure, while the camera confers the continuous traveling motion of film. The scene’s rigid geometry, the raw lighting against a dark backdrop, and the rainfall and birdsong soundtrack lend the scene a grave, dramatic aspect that clashes with the brief interludes in which the ballerinas, dressed in apparently amateur costumes, break their pose. The experience of these performers seems to be in suspended animation: their bodies are trapped in a hypnotic, imaginary space like the turning cogs in some strange music box.

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.]

Paris, 1947

Since the 1980s, the artist has pursued a photography-based work that is unique in its interdisciplinarity. His research goes beyond the photographic language to explore aspects of architecture, site-specific artworks, land art and painting, with photographic references drawn from figures like Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams. However, one of Rousse’s greatest influences is the suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich, especially his Black Square (1913-1915), which had such an impact on him that he felt driven to invent an original way of unifying painterly language with issues of spatiality in the photographic field.

It was based on this work that Rousse began a line of research that would see him construct meticulous ephemeral installations inside abandoned or condemned buildings in order to transform them into illusory—he uses the term “pictorial”—spaces that exist only in photography. Adopting large-format enlargements, like those on show at the Triennial, the artist created an immersive experience that draws the viewer inside virtual scenarios. Six photographs from different phases were exhibited at Frestas, including Oberhausen (1996) and Matsushima (2013)—a brief but significant retrospective of his career to date.

Cualicán, 1963. Lives in Mexico City

Investigating the violence that plagues Mexico, largely the result of narcoterrorism, is a recurrent practice in the work of Teresa Margolles. Far from the traditional association between death and joy in Mexico’s visual culture, the artist gathers documents that stoke the public debate on a problem so persistent it has become practically systemic. The artist worked as a coroner with the Forensic Medicine Department from 1993 to 1998, and the experience supplied her with an insider’s view of morgues, the stages in human decomposition and the red tape that surrounds murder victims. Over the years, Margolles has raised related issues in performances, videos, installations and sculptures in which the viewer experiences—often through direct contact—a disturbing association between aesthetics and violence.

In Vaporización [Vaporization] (2001), the artist humidified the exhibition space with the water used to wash cadavers. This same water was transformed into air bubbles that filled a gallery in the 2003 work En el aire [In the Air]. At the Venice Biennale in 2009, Margolles presented, among other works, the installation Bandera [Flag], which consisted of fabric steeped in blood collected from the streets and then raised on a pole beside the Mexican flag.

At Frestas, she presents the series Ajuste de cuentas [Settling the Score] (2007), which relates the theme of violent death to material luxury. For this work, Margolles made necklaces, rings, bracelets and charms out of 18-karat gold, but instead of diamonds or other gems, she inserted shards of glass extracted from the bodies of people killed in gun battles between the armed forces and narcoterrorists in the streets of Culiacán. Put on display in showcases like those found at jewelry stores, the pieces are a discreet, seductive invitation to admire horror.

[F.J.]