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.]

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.]