Oscar Murillo: Horizontal Darkness in Search of Solidarity

Lively little flags. The rustic roof full of life. Restaurant. Corina sits at a stone table on a rough-hewn bench. She suffers from anxiety that goes from her empty stomach to her aching head. She lights the last cigarette from the empty pack she tears into little colored strips of paper.
–Patrícia Galvão, Industrial Park (1933)

Patrícia Galvão’s hard-hitting novel Industrial Park by vividly portrays the turbulent life of workers in Brazil during the 1930s. Poverty, exploitation, Marxist turmoil and trade-union activism are omnipresent; a workers’ strike is brutally put down. From the perspective of three women, Galvão describes an environment where sharing salted popcorn with a lover is ultimately more real than all the talk of the triumph of the proletariat. People show solidarity, stick together and fight to improve their situation in the face of all setbacks. It is a world that offers deep insights into how Oscar Murillo (*1986 in La Paíla, Columbia) approaches the subject of labour and what he understands by solidarity.

Murillo is an artist who undermines expectations: primarily working in painting, he goes beyond its limits by integrating video, drawing, sculpture and performance in impressive environmental installations. He has transformed the Kunstverein’s main hall into an agora reflecting his enduring belief in geographic, cultural and sociopolitical solidarity. In this exhibition, titled Horizontal Darkness in Search of Solidarity, large canvases from the “Manifestation” series meet the artist’s “effigies”—stuffed dolls symbolizing the ordinary people of his Colombian hometown. Visitors are invited to sit down on a number of stepped seating structures that double up as a site for the accompanying events program while serving as a vantage point for visitors to take in the scene and observe the agora as a site of debate.