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.]

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.]

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.]

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.