Ragnar Kjartansson
The Visitors
May 31–June 29, 2015
Auto Body
May 31–June 8, 2015
Faena Art Center
Aimé Paine 1169
Buenos Aires
T +4010 9233
Faena Art presents two distinct but related exhibitions, opening this summer at Faena Art Center Buenos Aires (FAC), which demonstrate the power of performing bodies, in both physical and digital forms, to explore temporality and the role of gender in contemporary art and performance.
Ragnar Kjartansson
The Visitors
Co-presented with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) led by Founder and Chairwoman Francesca von Habsburg, renowned Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s 2012 work The Visitors is a nine-channel video installation that will occupy the entire Sala Catedral of the Faena Art Center. Featuring nine life-sized video tableaux, eight musicians and an eclectic choir in trance-like immersion in front of a running camera in one continuous durational take, the artist and collaborators perform one song, Feminine Ways, on a variety of instruments throughout the many rooms of Rokeby Farm in upstate New York. The piece is a hymn to the feminine and its melancholic triumph, an incantation of friendship to the melody of romantic despair.
Auto Body
Debuted in December 2014 during Miami Art Week, the traveling exhibition Auto Body features women artists (nominated by a committee of 26 international women curators) working in video, performance and new media. With each new city, a local curatorial committee selects works by local artists to be added to the show—continually fostering a new exchange of ideas and an international conversation on the political and economic inequalities of the art world and beyond.
The project’s first iteration featured works by 35 international female artists; for Auto Body Buenos Aires, its first international stop,three local curators have added works by ten Argentine artists. By acknowledging the underrepresentation of women in the art world, Auto Body serves as a platform for female voices and presents performativity as a powerful catalyst for change.
Focusing on time-based practices as an alternative to an object-driven market, the exhibition presents the body as language, in which overarching themes of voice collide. Notable video and performance works from the first iteration in Miami include Zackary Drucker‘s live performance The Inability to Be Looked At and The Horror of Nothing to See, which utilizes the body to illicit desire and voyeuristic shame for the viewee; and Untitled Sept 16, 2011 by Tameka Norris, which, with a minimal gesture, speaks volumes about the silencing and invisibility endemic to our society. New additions to the Buenos Aires exhibition include La Casa Rodante, a video by Ana Gallardo in which the artist documents her pilgrimage of moving from house to house every month during one year—positing personal belongings as the symbols that establish identity. Kara Peisajovich‘s light installation Untitled pushes the human body’s perception of space through the creation of new luminosity. Esteemed choreographer Cecilia Bengolea, who has been featured at the Gwanju Biennial, Sadler’s Wells in England, and The Kitchen in New York, will perform a new version of her work Sylphides.
“We’re proud to present The Visitors and Auto Body this season at the Faena Art Center—bringing international artists and curators together here in Buenos Aires,” says Ximena Caminos,chair of Faena Art and executive director of FAC. “A video installation by a male Icelandic artist and a group performance and video exhibition by international women artists may not seem a natural pairing, but both insist on the radical presence and transcendence of the body. Through performance and its subsequent documentation, these artists push for new perceptions of time, space and gender that invite viewers to reflect on the in-between spaces we occupy.”
Alan Faena, Principal of Faena Group, notes: “Artistic exchange and fostering creativity have always been central to the Faena identity. These two exhibitions exemplify our mission to catalyze experimentation within and across artistic disciplines, and to foster cross-cultural collaborations among artists across the Americas and around the world.”
Faena Art serves as a platform for cultural manifestations that are housed in Faena Art Center Buenos Aires and its newly launched sister venue, Faena Forum, opening in Miami Beach in December 2015. Faena Art Center is supported by HSBC and Citroën.
Press inquiries:
Faena Art Center
Florencia Binder
T +54 11 4021 5555 – 1436 / fbinder [at] faena.com
Resnicow + Associates
Barbara Escobar
T +1 212 671 5174 / bescobar [at] resnicow.com
