Who’s the tiger? In 2012, the Wall Street Journal headed a report on the emerging economies of Colombia and Peru with the bold headline, “The New Tigers,” pitting them against the Asian “Tigers” of the 1960s–90s. Already projected to become the third largest economy in Latin America by 2014, Colombia is a country particularly rich in raw materials—including oil, coal, and gold—and it is one of the largest exporters of coffee worldwide. The streets of its capital city of Bogotá are often characterized either by slow-moving traffic or absolute gridlock, reflecting the ubiquitous, post-traumatic effect its repressive political policy imposes on the rituals of daily life. Launched concurrently with artBO, the International Art Fair Bogotá (which recently celebrated its ninth installment from October 25–28, 2013), the up-and-coming Parisian galerie mor ∙ charpentier initiated María José Arjona’s continuous, four-week performance …pero yo soy el tigre (…but I am the tiger, 2013), which was curated by Eugenio Viola, as the inaugural event of their new branch in Bogotá. Since its founding in 2010, mor ∙ charpentier has primarily focused on artists from Latin America and its diaspora—such as Milena Bonilla, Maria Elvira Escallón, and Oscar Muñoz from Colombia; Teresa Margolles and Yoshua Okón from …

Drawing is most itself when other than itself. The exhibition “Des(enho)” ventures beyond drawing by locating the very act (its gesture) in the context of a larger domain: mark-making, mapping, transposing, translating. This list of verbs is not accidental; the exhibition renders acts, actions, activities, rather than objects. Rodrigo Moura, in his brief curatorial statement paraphrasing Rosalind Krauss, proposes the occurrence of “drawing in the expanded field,” a kind of diffusion or invasion of drawing practices into other media. Consequently, the exhibition focuses on works where drawing insists on its own presence—not necessarily as a medium but as a concept, gesture, metaphor. Territorial expansions are precarious and hazardous undertakings. Take photography, for instance, some decades ago: there was an extraordinary expansion and dispersion of the field that gradually yielded to a kind of disruptive dissolution. Or to put it more candidly: there are limitless answers to the question, “what is drawing?”. But will the plethora of possibilities blunt the question, eventually leading towards a conceptual quagmire? Through a conceptually generous selection of works from five artists, the exhibition offers a series of dialogues with the concept of drawing. Marcius Galan’s Drawing a Line (2011) gives us attentive records—or translations—of the most elementary …