Julieta Aranda: Clear Coordinates for Our Confusion

The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, UNAM)  presents the first review of Julieta Aranda’s artistic production. With works spanning from the early 2000s through the present, the exhibition curated by Alejandra Labastida looks into Aranda´s work through the perspective of her collaboration with time, understood not only as an object of investigation but as an autonomous, active interlocutor. Through systematic sculptures that combine various disciplines and media, Aranda navigates our different fields of interaction with time—personal, biological, scientific, geopolitical, economic, philosophical, literary, etc.—to acknowledge those poetic events in which time escapes from the perennial attempts of the Western anthropological machine to domesticate it and convert it into a tool of planetary domination.  

Aranda’s work assumes the implications of defining ourselves in relation to time on different scales and planes. This conversation began with You Had No Ninth of May!, in which the artist explores the arbitrary nature of the international date line and the decision of the archipelagic state of Kiribati to alter it in order to reverse the division of its territory into two temporalities. Her project Time/Bank, a collaboration with Anton Vidokle, shifted her research to the realm of economic exchange and the possibility of infiltrating it through a form of trade determined by pleasure. Time/Bank will be presented at Goethe-Institut Mexiko. Her more recent pieces incorporate scales ranging from the microbiological to the cosmic: from escapology, which drives our exploration of outer space, to the search for the universal particle and the lessons taught by our nonhuman terrestrial cohabitants.
 
That animal which gets bored and gives birth to time, that animal which interiorizes death, that ontologically narrative being… perhaps Burroughs was wrong and the virus that has infected us isn’t language but time, with all the debts this implies. Independently of whether this virus is of human design, Aranda reminds us that “laying a trap and escaping from one involve the same logic.”

In energy terms, beyond our temporal fantasies and deliriums and the political operations that sustain them, all living beings exist in a state of flux, borrowing order from the universe and returning it as disorder. So wouldn’t it be better to learn to learn how to inhabit contradiction and confusion? Aranda’s conversations with Time offer a series of coordinates that orient us toward this goal.

As part of the public programs of the exhibition, a new edition of The Futurological Congress, periodically organized by the artist, will be presented at Polyforum Siqueiros in Mexico City. On this occasion, the invited guests, including Chus Martínez and Elizabeth Povinelli, will reflect on Another End of the World is Possible. 

National visual arts production made possible by the fiscal incentive established in article 190 of the income Tax Law (EFIARTES).