Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Moris
September 4–November 23, 2014
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
Tres Picos 29, Colonia Polanco
México City
Disciplines such as ethnography and urban anthropology have been defining the practice of some artists currently working in the cultural centers of the American continent; their issues regard the confronted positions within the socio-political praxis that ultimately define our societies. The Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS) continues its exhibitions program presenting the work of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico), and Moris (b. 1978, Mexico City), artists coming about two forceful cultural centers of the so-called Latin-American context. In both cases their work departs from exploration and observation, while elaborating a critical portrait of their particular immediate contexts.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
MATRULLA. Landscape and Memory.
This is the first individual exhibition of the artist in Mexico. Her work focuses on the image and narrative constructions, which—approached through discomfort and/or humor—tense the limits between fiction and documentary. The exhibition includes a new commissioned work titled MATRULLA.
The films created by Santiago Muñoz—media generally preferred by the artist—demonstrate an evident closeness to the tradition of documentary and/or ethnographic films; appropriating the genre’s capacity to assume a critical point of view that goes beyond the sole portraying of events. While subverting the documental archive, the artist’s exploration incorporates fictional elements in determined situations.
The memory, landscape, and subjects attended conform the discursive elements in her work; utilizing cinematographic representation devices to explore and restore the historical memory of certain communities.
MATRULLA is a 16mm film commissioned by Proyecto Siqueiros-SAPS (Project Siqueiros-SAPS). The work shows the life and political project of Pablo Díaz Cuadrado, who since 1972 has lived a few kilometers away from Lake Matrullas in the village of Orocovis, situated in the central mountain chain of Puerto Rico.
The film is an approximation to physical structures, time and places conceived as an assemblage; departing from a subtle and seemingly left behind position which sustains its subjects’ livelihood by gathering waste materials discarded by progress, and in doing so, tests the possibilities of other ways of life.
Moris
Prey and Predator
Traces of Illegality and Violence
The exhibition develops a cartographic lecture regarding lawlessness and violence immersed in social life, mainly in Mexico City.
The work of Moris aims to demonstrate the mechanisms that emerge within the context of unequal power relationships in the Mexican society.
The show exposes the traces and codes shared by historically marginalized subjects, whom, enclosed by the dynamics of macroeconomic factors such as poverty and unemployment, generate illegal self-employment structures, which in turn constitute one of the elements that nurtures the logic of violence ruling life in this city and the rest of the country.
Some of these people are downgraded when categorized as “insignificant subjects”—a concept which names those devoid of any law that would guarantee their safety and survival—making them disposable beings immersed in an existence completely deprived of juridical rights.
The exhibition traces a physical and conceptual journey where the spectator can relate to a social situation in which any person could easily find itself trapped in transit between being Prey or Predator.
In this occasion Proyecto Fachada (Facade Project): A Monster Walks among You has also been created by Moris, and commissioned by the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros; the work is a public activation of the curatorial and artistic concepts presented inside the museum.
About Proyecto Siqueiros (Project Siqueiros)
Integrated by the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS) in Mexico City, and La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Proyecto Siqueiros is a platform for national and international contemporary art designed as a space for critical reviewing while preserving and promoting the artworks held by both venues. Launched in 2010, the project seeks to articulate reflective proposals regarding the theoretical and artistic precepts set forth by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros; attending to the public nature of art and its social and political commitments, alongside his ever present search for experimental languages and materials.
These exhibitions have been conceived by Yameli Mera, Curator of the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros.
