Summary
For OTRA DE VAQUEROS, a group exhibition in Mexico City, the backroom will present source materials by: Richard Aldrich, John M. Armleder, Walead Beshty, Pierre Bismuth, Anne Collier, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Dennis Crompton (Archigram), Jeremy Deller, Kota Ezawa, Claire Fontaine, Ryan Gander, Mario Garica Torres, Amy Granat, Sam Green, David Hatcher, Paul Ramírez Jonas, William Jones, Stephen Kaltenbach, Thomas Lawson, Jesse Lerner, Lim Tzay Chuen, Nate Lowman, Lu Jie, Marko Lulic, Raimundas Malasauskas, Erlea Maneros, John Menick, Naeem Mohaiemen, Julian Myers, Michelle O'Marah, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Raqs Media Collective, Sean Snyder, Tercerunquinto, Jeffery Vallance, Miguel Ventura.
#10
From March until May of 2007, the backroom was featured at La Celda Contemporánea Gallery at the University Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City. For this iteration, the backroom participated as one of three satellite projects (along with Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Tensta Konsthall) to the OTRA DE VAQUEROS exhibition in Mexico City, organized by Perros Negros (Mexico D.F.) and Toasting Agency (Paris).
Pierre Bismuth, the Center for Land Use Iterpretation, Claire Fontaine, Ryan Gander, Lim Tzey Chuen, Raimundas Malasauskas, Naeem Mohaiemen and Sean Snyder have each newly contributed materials to the backroom.
Images and Information
_______________________
PRESS RELEASE
2/20/06
OTRA DE VAQUEROS includes a one-month residency and exhibition in Mexico City. The participating artists are Sean Snyder (U.S.A., works in Berlin); Jeremy Deller (U.K., lives and works in London); Minerva Cuevas (Mexico, lives and works in Mexico City); Karl Holmqvist (Sweden, lives and works between Stockholm and Berlin); Bernadette Corporation (U.S.A. live and work between Paris, Berlin, and N.Y.); Artemio (Mexico, lives ans works in Mexico City); Bruno Serralongue (France, lives and works in Paris); Claire Fontaine (U.K./Italy, lives and works in Paris); Jennifer Allora-Guillermo Calzadilla (U.S.A/Cuba, live and work in Puerto Rico); Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda (U.S.A./Japan, live and work between Berlin and Dusseldorf); Mario Garcia-Torres (Mexico, lives and works in Los Angeles).
____________________
Rather than formulating a ready-made theme, or a packaged concept that would frame or inform this exhibition as well as the participating artists works before it has even started, the project proposes to examine how, through specific practices, part of the emerging generation of contemporary artists in Mexico as well as internationally, relates or deals with some of the contemporary issues and facts that tend to define and set the context in which art is currently happening in.
Acknowledging on the one hand that the once subterranean art world has become part of the broader, anonymous cultural industry (at a global level), and that this has generated shifts in the role and status of art, as well as in the function of the artist, the exhibition will make way for artistic strategies that effectively rethink production of art as well as contemporary artistic identity.
Through a sharp and critical understanding of the mechanisms and economy of the images factories that surround us, and often capitalizing on collaborative, collective or common projects as ways to shift focus from authorship, signature style and authority, to develop practices, situations and production of discourse, most of the participating artists have initiated drastically different aesthetical relationships and contexts - some of them their very own (labels, projects rooms etc.), with great autonomy - in and/or outside the premises or the art world.
Working with text, film, sculpture, photography, painting, and every other media available, it is primarily the cultural, political and social debris of the Western world that constitutes the prime material of these artists, a common, available and free ground from which it becomes possible to rethink or remodel our relation and engagement towards the notion of culture, including all its contemporary avatars.