Armando Andrade Tudela: On Working And Then Not Working

Curated by Elfi Turpin

Putting together an exhibition with Armando Andrade Tudela is like undertaking a trepanation. It’s making a hole in the artist’s head and inserting our fingers. Opening up his work to take the pressure off. Cutting a doorway into an artist’s system and sending him off down new roads to adventure. A delicate, archaic, ironic business. Trepanation is also a way of escaping a kind of exhibition bureaucracy bent on petrifying works we’d like to keep in a critical state until they tip over into the categories—sculpture, painting, photography, film, tool, furniture—that dichotomize studio practice and conceptual practice, North and South, hand and head. Trepanation’s a ruse. There are others.

Putting together an exhibition with Armando Andrade Tudela is working and then not working. It’s experiencing a transition—the moment when “The sun refused to set or, no, the Earth refused to move so that the sun could set, yes.”[1] It’s conceiving a space-time in which, in order to preserve them from that fixed mode of existence, the works are maintained in a kind of ambiguity, a process of transformation or of adaptation to paradoxical desires. Whether speaking to Peruvian modernity, European empathy, the pressure of things on the body or the traumatising effects of the academic, the work endlessly eludes any univocal approach, offering itself, instead, to oblique scrutiny from both sides of the Ocean.

–E. T., May 2018.

[1] Alan Dugan, Poems Seven: New Poems and Complete Poetry (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001).


Opening garden party on Thursday, June 14 at 7:30pm. Free shuttle from Art Basel, departure at the corner of Bleichestrasse & Isteinerstrasse at 7pm, return to Basel (via Mulhouse) at 10:30pm.

RSVP and press contact: Richard Neyroud, r.neyroud [​at​] cracalsace.com


On Working And Then Not Working is conceived in collaboration with CA2M - Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid) which will propose a second iteration curated by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané on February 22, 2019, and will go along with a publication. 

CRAC Alsace is a member of d.c.a and Versant Est.

CRAC Alsace is supported by: Ville d’Altkirch, Conseil Départemental du Haut-Rhin, Région Grand Est and DRAC Grand Est – Ministère de la Culture.