Anna Boghiguian: A Walk in the Unconscious / Abraham Cruzvillegas: Approximating Vibrant Retroflex Self-Constriction

Anna Boghiguian: A Walk in the Unconscious
Anna Boghiguian (born 1946) produces drawings and paintings of individuals and urban spaces, and is also a poet. Her artistic approach can be understood as an attempt at mapping the world. For her, individuals are conditioned by the space around them and the self by the walls constructed by cultural, religious or political conditions. She is always travelling to abolish these frontiers, creating wherever she goes, but always returning home to Cairo. In the seventies, she also composed from the noises of the city, which she then transposed into the field of painting. Her paintings are always very dense compositions, and are sometimes presented along with her own writings. Her narratives combine personal history and politics passing from past to present, deconstructing reality and heading towards the mythological. We are faced with a world in movement, undergoing continuous transformation. She constructs a highly personal space inhabited by her story but listening to the world and the issues involved in its transformation. At Carré d’Art, she will be developing a complex, poetical narrative based on the city’s rich past and on our reality.

This is her debut solo exhibition at an art institution. Recent shows at the ZKM, Documenta 13, the Venice, Sharjah and Istanbul biennales, at the New Museum New York, and Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven.

Abraham Cruzvillegas: Approximating Vibrant Retroflex Self-Constriction
(with the participation of Viridiana Toledo Rivera & Andrés Garcia Nestitla)
Abraham Cruzvillegas’s approach calls up history and self-construction within the economic, social and political contexts. He uses various production and reception strategies to create meaning. He breathes fresh life into objects in new contexts so as to alter the way we interpret them. Central to his work is his reflection on interrelations and interconnections. He is interested in things that are discarded or recycled often in the context of Mexico City or recently in Paris for a project he conducted on the outskirts of Paris. He examines how stories are constructed or reconstructed on the basis of information, documents and eye-witness accounts. Improvisation and assemblage are core practices in connection with the idea of economic survival, work and the ready-made. He devised the Autoconstruction project based on the experience of his parents who built their home with found materials. The idea is the development of an architecture that makes reference to the natural process of necessity and opportunity. The Carré d’Art show features new works produced in connection with the context, based on collecting materials in the city of Nîmes, and will include the participation of a pair of traditional dancers, who will interact with the sculptures so as to produce various sounds.

Born in 1968 and living in Mexico City, he has featured in numerous international biennales and was the guest artist invited to produce a work for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2015. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Haus der Kunst Munich, and the Jumex Museum in Mexico City.