María Wills Londoño is appointed curator of MOMENTA 2019

MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image is delighted to announce the appointment of María Wills Londoño as curator for its 16th edition, which will take place in September and October 2019. Drawing on a theme titled The Life of Things, Colombian independent curator María Wills Londoño will explore the relationship between object and image. The exhibitions and all of the activities for the public will be organized around this theme.

The Life of Things

“It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. Right? And this bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.” –Ricky Fitts, American Beauty (Sam Mendes)

MOMENTA 2019 will explore the character, even the personality, taken on by objects conveyed through images. The biennale’s 16th edition will present artists who examine perspectives of things in metaphysical dimensions, beyond material characteristics. The event will shed light on the universes that are built between people and their surroundings by focusing on the diverse approaches employed by artists in relation to things: compositions, constructions, alternative uses of abandoned objects, and unintentional sculptures.

In the exhibitions, this theme will be reflected in explorations of how a human being is a mixture between a subject and an object, and how one can be transformed into the other. The object always ends up marked by some sort of trace, memory, or souvenir that infuses it with subjectivity. The biennale will hinge on various thematic axes, things will be analyzed from a multiplicity of perspectives: as diaries and abandoned monuments; as protagonists in the narrative of the absurd; as evidences of the worldwide environmental crisis; as icons, symbols, or extensions of specific social groups; as performative bodies.

A thing can be the source of a narrative and bring to life, in turn, something of which the existence is scattered.

María Wills Londoño (Colombia) is an art researcher and curator. Her major exhibition projects offer reflections on the unstable condition of the contemporary image and alternative views of urban themes in Latin America. She has presented exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (PHotoESPAÑA), Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, and the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogota; she was the temporary exhibition curator at the last institution from 2009 to 2014. She co-curated Pulsions Urbaines, presented at Espace Van Gogh for Les Rencontres d’Arles 2017, and Oscar Muñoz. Photographies, which toured to Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, and the Museo de Arte de Lima. She founded the Visionarios program of the Instituto de Visión, with the mission of highlighting essential figures in Colombian conceptual art. She also co-curated the ARCO Colombia 2015 project in Madrid.

MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image is an international event that explores the contemporary image with a focus on the vast range of photographic and videographic languages. Founded in 1989 as Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, the organization was renamed MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image in 2017. Taking stock of the trends that compose a fluctuating art landscape and accounting for socio-political, cultural, economic, and geographic issues traversed by image-based practices, MOMENTA is proposed as a critical observation post and site of knowledge production in which experience becomes the key to a renewed gaze at the world.