Tuesday 29 January 2013

'OLINKA, WHERE MOVEMENT IS CREATED' CURATED BY ADAM SZYMCZYK AT MUSEO RUFINO TAMAYO, MEXICO


entrance to the exhibition Olinka curated by Adam Szymczyk at Museo Tamayo



Danh Vo, Untitled, 2012
Installation, 10 black and white photographs, artifacts Huichol Collection of Joseph Carrier
(Huichol artifacts meet Carrier's Vietnamese homoerotism)



Panajachel, Guatemala based Vivian Suter
Blankets Hung, 2010 - 2012
Oil and Acrylic on canvas, wooden structure
and Agatha, 2005 - 2012
Seven paintings, oil and Acrylic on canvas





sculptures by Thea Djordjadze
She didn´t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary or a fear of death. She worked, 2012



Manuel Rodríguez Lozano , The Taxi, 1924 (Portrait of Salvador Novo)
and copies of Novo's publication El Chafirete on bench


steel room divider courtain by Thea Djordjadze and drawings by Mariana Castillo Deball



Mariana Castillo Deball
The Skin of the Deer, 2011
Death Fed with Life in the First and Last Beat, 2011
What was a population of hieroglyphs, 2011


exhibition view


Nahui Olin, WWoman with Glasses, n.d.
and Paulina Olowska, Portrait of the Artist - Outdoor, 2012


Thea Djordjadze, Black open water, 2012


Paulina Olowska, The End of Spectacle, 2012 
(After Isamu Noguchi set element of Martha Graham’s dance “Cave of the Hearth”)
Concrete base, aluminum wire, spray paint and silk-screen on fabric 



view of exhibition room, sculpture and big painting between Nahui Olin's work by Paulina Olowska, Portrait of the Artist - Indoor, 2012



publications by Nahui Olin in cabinet


in cabinet, Elisabeth Wild (mother of Vivian Suter), Phantasies, n.d., Collages



Ross Birrell, Olinka Variations, 2012
Composition for piano and 12 prints





drawings and paintings by Nahui Olin and a photograph of Nahui Olin


Dr. Atl, Nahui Olin Hairless, 1923


Kate Davis, Disgrace v - viii, 2012





fascimiles of documents by Dr Atl regarding the creation of Olinka

and somewhere in the exhibition
Tercerunquinto, Sketch of an unrealized project hidden in the museum, 2012


Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created
The exhibition contains works and documents by Dr. Atl, Nairy Baghramian, Ross Birrell & David Harding, Mariana Castillo Deball, Kate Davis, Thea Djordjadze, Susan Hiller, Nahui Olin, Paulina Olowska, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Vivian Suter, Tercerunquinto, Danh Vo and Elisabeth Wild.
Curator: Adam Szymczyk
In collaboration with Magnolia de la Garza
December 11th, 2012 – April 15th, 2013 
Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City

"The name of the city it calls Olinka, what it means in Náhuatl “where the movement is concentrated.”
from Dr. Atl, “Esquema de un proyecto para edificar un centro internacional de investigaciones científicas”, 1959

Foreword
Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created is a group exhibition of works by contemporary artists, as well as documents and other works of historical importance. A number of different artistic techniques are on display, such as drawing, painting, installation, video and photography.

Despite the range of different materials and periods in which these works and records were created, every component of the exhibition shares an unusual connection with the past. Rather than looking at history as a collection of facts stored in the memory, Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created portrays history as unstable and constantly shifting, able to re-materialize and transform itself when recalled or reinterpreted.

The exhibition is named after Dr. Atl’s project of the 1940s in which he imagined the construction of an international city of culture called Olinka. Its denizens would be scientists, artists and philosophers, with a mission to plan human evolution. The etymological root of Olinka is Ollin, a Nahuatl word for movement, a concept that fits in with this exhibition’s dynamic approach to history.

Transposing the imaginary dimension of Olinka to the context of the exhibition creates a place in movement. The curatorial proposal includes figures from the twentieth-century art scene, such as Dr. Atl and Nahui Olin, juxtaposing them against the work of contemporary artists.

Curatorial Statement
In the works of many contemporary artists, history is present as a possibility that can suddenly materialize during the process of recollection and the rereading of historical material, rather than simply existing as a stately collection of immutable facts, stored in archives and written in stone. As Walter Benjamin noted, “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” The exhibition Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created is sustained in this interpretation: history opens not like a book, but as a chasm, a barranca suddenly split open in the middle of known things.

Contrary to the methods applicable to the study and classification of fossils, history can also be read not as a timeline of events stored in memory, but rather as a dynamic and ever-changing constellation of dormant or active sites. In this geological and topological interpretation of history as an unstable territory, a terrain built on many layers and shaken by violent quakes and eruptions, a new reading of history can create a movement, like a drop of water sending concentric ripples across time, reaching toward the future while passing the present moment.

Historical events and figures, materialized in monuments that may include texts, buildings and artifacts alike, resonate in unexpected ways in contemporary works of art. History has advantages and disadvantages for life; it can be used and abused in service of nationalist politics and capital, but it continues to inspire action and remains a powerful critical tool for many artists and thinkers today. If, as Nabokov had it, “The future is but the obsolete in reverse,” there is a revolutionary aspect to things long ago buried in the past: Nostalgia points toward a future, and history is where movement is created.

From the metaphor of change embodied by earthquake, we can imagine other forms of violent movement that affect us psychologically, emotionally and intellectually, and that exert an influence on social, ideological, and aesthetic dimensions of our existence—particularly in Mexico, the country ravaged by drug war and experiencing precarious life conditions, but also elsewhere. The artists in Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created testify to this state of things through their works.

Adam Szymczyk

*****
Notes:

Adam Szymczyk, curator (Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, 1970)
Adam Szymczyk has been the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel since 2003, where he has curated exhibitions of artists including Adriana Lara, Danai Anesiadou, Danh Vo, Lee Lozano, Hannah Weinberger, Artur Zmijewski, Paul Sietsema, Marieta Chirulescu, Rosalind Nashashibi, Tomma Abts, and Moyra Davey, as well as numerous group exhibitions. He was among the co-founders of the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw in 1997, and in 2008 he co-curated with Elena Filipovic When Things Cast No Shadow, the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art. In 2011 he received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement from the Menil Foundation, Houston. He lives and works in Basel.

Dr. Atl (Guadalajara, 1875 - Mexico City, 1964)
Gerardo Murillo, known as “Dr. Atl”, was a Mexican painter, writer, philosopher, and amateur volcanologist as well as a passionate supporter of arts and culture in Mexico. In 1896 he was admitted to the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (National School of Fine Arts) in Mexico City; a year later he was granted a scholarship to study in Europe. During his tour through England, Italy, and France he worked as a journalist while studying fine art, philosophy, and law, and he received a silver medal for his paintings in the Paris Salon of 1900. Upon returning to Mexico, Dr. Atl played an active role in the Mexican Revolution and became an important figure among Mexican artists of the period. In 1921 he met María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca who changed her name, at Dr. Atl’s suggestion, to Nahui Olin, which means the “fourth movement of the sun,” and is equal to the “earthquake’s sun,” according to Aztec mythology. Their tempestuous and creative relationship is described by Dr. Atl in his book Gentes profanas en el convento (1950). In 1941, Dr. Atl documented the birth and formation of the Paricutin volcano in texts, paintings, drawings, and photographs that became the book Cómo nace y crece un volcán, el Paricutín, (Paricutin: How a Volcano is Born and Grows, 1950). In the 1950s he began the project of creating a city in Mexico called Olinka, with a building in the form of an “inconceivably tall” cylinder populated by artists and scientists, who embody the spiritual and intellectual achievement of humanity. In 2011 the Museo Colección Blaisten, in that time part of the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, mounted Dr. Atl. Obras maestras, a survey of his work.

Olinka: 
Dr. Atl’s project for designing an “inconceivably tall” cylindrical building, inhabited by an intellectual elite of the learned and artists from around the world. From 1952, Dr. Atl tried to persuade politicians and scientists of the need to build Olinka. The artist envisaged the city being built in beautiful natural settings in Mexico, such as the Pihuamo valley in Michoacán; inside the craters of the Sierra de Santa Catarina; alongside Teotihuacán; at the Lagunas of Montebello in Chiapas; or near Tepoztlán.

Nahui Olin (Mexico City, 1893 - 1978)
María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca was a Mexican poet, painter, and model who embraced the pseudonym Nahui Olin. The name of fifth and last sun in the Nahuatl tradition, it symbolizes an age of violent transformation and the imminent extinction of humanity, and was given to her by Dr. Atl, with whom she had a storied personal and professional relationship; while his studies of her are quite famous, she also made some distinctly less-idealized portraits of him. After studying in Mexico City and Paris, and briefly settling in Spain with her first and only husband, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Olin returned to Mexico single. After the end of the Mexican Revolution, in which Olin’s late father played an important role, she famously began modeling for artists such as Diego Rivera, Chucho Reyes, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, and Dr. Atl. Though she also painted and drew during this period, her largest artistic output was her experimental poetic writing. Her poetry collections include Óptica cerebral. Poemas dinámicos (1922) and Câlinement je suis dedans (1923), as well as later anthologies that brought both her prose and her poems together. The most recent anthology is Nahui Olin. Sin principio ni fin. Vida, obra y varia invención by Patricia Rosas Lopátegui (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2012). Olin’s visual artworks, meanwhile, were recently the subject of the exhibition Nahui Olin: A Woman Beyond Time, at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago in 2007.

Monday 28 January 2013

'TOMORROW WAS ALREADY HERE' CURATED BY JULIETA GONZALEZ AT MUSEO TAMAYO, MEXICO CITY


Section 1: Archaeologists of the future: prophets, messages, and the labor of reconstruction



Fernando Bryce, Walter Benjamin, 2002


Simon Starling, Nachbau, 2007

Carol Bove, Viva, 2011

Mathias Goeritz, Mensaje xv, Levíticos xx: 18, 1959 


Kenneth Armitage, Small Prophet Version II, 1962 and Mathias Goeritz, Mensaje xv, Levíticos xx: 18, 1959 

Section 2: Memories of the future

Gerard Byrne, 1984 and Beyond, 2007 

Section 3: Cold War Anxieties: from Splitnik to Sputnik.
Simon Starling, Project for a Temporary Public Sculpture (Hiroshima), (mobile), 2009 

Roberto Matta, Justified Sinner, 1952
Henry Moore, Large Slow Form, 1962 
Henry Moore, Figures with Smoke Background, 1976  


Adolph Gottlieb , Burst, 1972 
Barbara Hepworth, Square Form with Circles, 1963



Johan Grimonprez, Double Take, 2008 


Julieta Aranda, If you tell the story well, it will not have been a comedy, 2009 

Section 4: The last frontier: space is the place



Kiluanji Kia Henda, Icarus 13, 2006 


Jane y Louise Wilson, Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard, 2000 


The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun), Otolith I, 2003 


Steve McQueen, Once Upon a Time, 2002 

Period room, works by 
Martha Boto, Julio Le Parc, Giò Pomodoro, Earl Reiback, Francisco Sobrino, Victor Vasarely


Carol Bove (Ginebra, 1971) Dawn, 2010 

Section 5: This was tomorrow. Ruin value, and obsolescence: must planned cities always end in the graveyard of failed utopias?
Sergio de Camargo, Estructura 460, 1978 
Ben Nicholson, Project, 1966 
Jesús Rafael Soto, Doble relación, 1969 


Copies of Signals Newsletter dedicated to Camargo, Soto and with material regarding Nicholson


David Maljkovic, Retired Form, 2008



Matthias Müller, Vacancy (Brasilia), 1998 



Pedro Reyes, Parque vertical, 2002 - 2006


Victor Pasmore, Blue Development (Jade), 1967 
Jane y Louise Wilson, Monument, 2003
Toby Paterson, Apollo Reprise (Imaginary Landsca- pe with Pavilion and Pool), 2012


Rita McBride Settlements (Chandigarh), 2009 and Color Test (Superman), 2009 





and the museums not so fortunate new addition to the 1981 building, done in 2012 by Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon, who together with Abraham Zabludovsky was one of the original authors of the 1981 project

curator's text:
Tomorrow Was Already Here
curated by Julieta Gonzalez
Museo Rufino Tamayo

with Julieta Aranda, Fernando Bryce, Gerard Byrne, Johan Grimonprez, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Július Koller, David Maljkovic, Dorit Margreiter, Rita McBride, Steve McQueen, Matthias Müller, The Otolith Group, Jane and Louise Wilson; and works from the Museo Tamayo collection by Kenneth Armitage, Marta Boto, Enrico Castellani, Barbara Hepworth, Mathias Goeritz, Adolph Gottlieb, Julio Le Parc, Roberto Matta, Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore, Giò Pomodoro and Simon Starling, among others.

The past two decades have witnessed major shifts in contemporary art practices towards what some critics and art historians have identified alternatively as the “archival impulse” and the “historiographic turn;” History itself has become an important subject-matter as well as a medium for contemporary artists who favour the representational apparatuses of archival formats such as film, video and photography as prime vehicles for their historiographic endeavours.

Tomorrow Was Already Here is an exhibition that attempts to trace a particular thread of the current historiographic turn in contemporary art by showcasing the work of artists who cast a retrospective gaze towards past visions of the future. The title of the show refers to the device of the predestination paradox, characteristic of time-travel related science fiction, whereby a traveller from the future travels to the past and, more often than not, effects irreversible changes in the future, which result in the traveller’s erasure from it. Thus, tomorrow returns as a spectral presence from the past; it is no longer within our reach. Though not included in the exhibition, Chris Marker’s La Jetée is an overarching presence in the exhibition and the time-loop paradox that lies at the heart of the exhibition pays tribute to his work.

The spectres of modernity and its utopian visions of the future haunt this exhibition, constructed upon some of the predictive cultural imaginaries at the height of the Cold War, many of which intersect the realm of science fiction and are set against three backdrops: anxiety in the face of nuclear annihilation; space travel and colonization as a powerful trope in the culture of the time; and architecture as the visible realm in which many utopian undertakings of the past took concrete form.

Works from the collection of the Museo Tamayo serve to contextualize the three realms explored by the exhibition in small period displays, which function as time-capsules, with art works of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s that engage in a reflection on similar themes, but also present different iterations of the modern.

The notion of potentiality, of the of the future that could have been but never happened, pervades this exhibition. The works convey, at times, a nostalgic sense of loss in coming to terms with the unrealized potential of the twentieth century’s visions of the future. But more importantly, these artists, through their works, engage history as a way of understanding the present and constructing a vision of the future by invoking, yet again, the specter of utopia.

Archaeologists of the future: prophets, messages, and the labor of reconstruction
The exhibition’s structure mirrors, in great part, the aesthetic strategies deployed by the participating artists in their works. It also relies on the works as conceptual platforms that contribute new readings and establish dialogues with nearby works or thematic groups. This small room functions as a preamble to the exhibition and the works in it play an articulating role for what follows, in terms of conceptual operations, and thematic content. The operations of reconstruction, historical inquiry, and reflection, as well as the reading of modernity’s visions of the future through predictive imaginaries that function as messages from the past are conveyed by the different works in this room. Carol Bove and Simon Starling engage in distinct and diverse processes of historical reconstruction, Fernando Bryce’s drawings of Walter Benjamin point to the continued meditation on history that takes place in this exhibition. The historical works from the collection by Kenneth Armitage and Mathias Goeritz respectively allude to the act of prediction and its communication by way of messages; furthermore, they introduce but also make more complex the structure of the period room that repeats itself throughout the rest of the exhibition.

Memories of the future
Gerard Byrne’s 1984 and Beyond (2007) takes on an articulating role in the exhibition. The work is an installation comprised of three videos and a group of black and white photographs that address the idea of future visions that now belong to the past. The three videos alternate footage of Byrne’s staging of a conversation that took place in the pages of Playboy Magazine in the summer of 1963, between science fiction writers who were invited to talk about the future, setting the Orwellian date of 1984 as the time frame for their predictions.

The predictive imaginaries conceived of by the science fiction writers in this video-installation describe the three major thematic axes in the exhibition. The spatial configuration of the room also suggests two different paths through the exhibition which continues towards the section that addresses the climate of apprehension, anxiety, and paranoia characteristic of the early stages of the Cold War, or conversely, the one that touches upon the utopian visions of the future that inspired modern architecture and urban planning.

Cold War Anxieties: from Splitnik to Sputnik.
Aside from the threat of preemptive nuclear strikes and annihilation, The Cold War period was a complex one that witnessed a realignment of the political, economical and ideological forces that shaped the world in the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II and the development and implementation of atomic weapons, the optimism surrounding technological progress was dampened by questions posed around the ethical use of technology and scientific research. Nevertheless, technological progress also meant the exploration of new frontiers in all spheres of life; from the emancipatory power of home appliances that freed women from domestic labor to the conquest of space afforded by the missile technologies that had previously enabled victories on the war front. The technological race thus provided yet another arena where Cold War politics could be staged.

Parallel developments in the domain of art also reflected this realignment of forces, which are made patent in the works included in the “period room,” by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Roberto Matta and Adolph Gottlieb, which convey anxiety in the face of atomic annihilation, as well as oppressive visions of humanity taken over by machines. In close dialogue, the installation by Simon Starling revisits similar themes and aesthetic approaches, focusing on the idea of the monument and its commemorative function. The works by Johan Grimonprez and Julieta Aranda add another dimension to the to the theme of Cold War anxieties, in the guise of temporal loops and the metaphors of time travel, addressing from individual perspectives the complexities of this period of modern history and its long-lasting effects in the cultural imaginaries of today.

The last frontier: space is the place
The themes of space travel and colonization, privileged sites of sci-fi speculation, are addressed by the works of Steve McQueen, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Jane and Louise Wilson, and The Otolith Group. The photographic contents of the Golden Record, a time-capsule sent to space in 1977 on board the Voyager 1 and 2 space vessels, that included sounds and images that portrayed the diversity of life and culture on Earth is set against the sound of a disconcerting cacophony of voices in the work of Steve McQueen. The spectre of colonialism and the aftermath of decolonization in third world countries during the Cold War are revisited in several works: Kiluanji Kia Hend’s fiction of an Angolan space program, triggered by the cold war gift of a Soviet Monument to Space to the Angolan government in the 1960s; the Otolith Group’s merging of the history of women’s political and labour movements in postcolonial India with the account of a real encounter of one of these women with Valentina Tereshkova, the Soviet cosmonaut, and first woman in space; Jane and Louise Wilson’s portrayal of the Soviet Space Program in the ex Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, which highlights the uneasy coexistence of space-race technological deployment with the millenary ethnic traditions of the Kazakh peoples. Július Koller appears to interrogate the future with his question marks aimed at outer space, which form part of his series of “Universal-cultural Futurological Operations” (UFO); these are part of his approach to social and collective dynamics in conditions of oppression in the East-Bloc during that period. Carol Bove’s work approximates the visual vocabulary of the works in the period display, and is included among that group of works. The period works here revisit the optimistic take on technological progress, and the space-age imaginaries that permeated art, architecture and industrial design during the 1960s. A selection of op-kinetic inflected paintings and sculptures from the collection reflect the spirit of these art manifestations of the mid to late sixties, and their relation to specific technological conceptions of the period.

This was tomorrow. Ruin value, and obsolescence: must planned cities always end in the graveyard of failed utopias?
This section of the exhibition addresses the utopian and futuristic undertakings of modernist architecture and urban planning. The present-day ambivalence towards these architectures and planned cities is made evident in several of the works in this section of the exhibition; Dorit Margreiter aims her inquiry at the forward-looking post-war reconstruction of Berlin’s Hansaviertel district and the perception of its present-day inhabitants about what was conceived of as a model city of the future; the Otolith Group raise questions regarding the long-term sustainability of modernity’s planned cities. The notion of obsolescence, of both modernity’s forms and projects, is introduced in David Maljkovic’s works, which take the image of a public monument built during the Soviet occupation of Yugoslavia as an emblem of both the obsolescence and persistence of modernity’s forms. In other works, the ruin inhabits very different social, economic and historical contexts: the utopias of modernisation of the Third-World in the references to Chandigarh featured in the works of Rita McBride and the Otolith Group, Pedro Reyes’ reconsideration of Mario Pani’s Tlatelolco urban development, and Matthias Müller’s portrait of a decaying Brasilia; and the housing schemes for working class of post-industrial England embodied in Victor Pasmore’s design of the Peterlee urban complex and its now dilapidated Apollo Pavillion, featured in Jane and Louise Wilson’s video-installation and Toby Paterson’s wall painting. The period works included in this section of the exhibition do not address architecture per se but rather seek to identify a heightened awareness of spatial issues in the art of the time, as well as a concern for the integration of different mediums such as painting, sculpture and architecture.

http://museotamayo.org/