Machines for Vision. Exercise 2: Venus
August 31st – Octuber 20th, 2018
INFO
The Vision Machine is a multi-part project Adriana Bustos is developing. It continues her investigative approach to art making, based on research and extensive collection of images from the past, which the artist re-arranges and juxtaposes in order to offer critical narratives about systems of power. The idea of this series is to pose questions about what we see, hoy we see it, and how vision has the ability to either reingorce or take apart the narratives which underlie systems of oppression Exercise Number 2: Venus is about women, their historical position within patriarchal societies and states.
Two large maps -representing polarized views yet identical in structure and sorrounded by drawings- depict the constellations as they appeared in the skies on day one of month one on the christian era. The names of stars have been replaced by words/concepts which act as a guide to the drawn images around them. One of the maps quotes historical images depicting acts of actual or simbolic violence. They are rendered in red and when looked throug a filter positioned in front of the work they fade away. The images in the opposite map depict famous and unknoun women as well as references to practices and events historically assoccciated with women, wich have been repressed.
The Venus of Valdivia, small sculptures belonging to a matrilineal ancient culture in ecuador, symbolically loom over the space.
In a separate section of the gallery the video installation National Ceremony juxtaposes the first thirteen minutes of the opening ceremony of the 1978 World Soccer Cup in Argentina, during the military dictatorship that murdered thousands, with the first thirteen minutes of Leni Rehinfenstahl’s documentary film on the 1934 Olympics in Nazi Germany underscoring chilling similarities.
Adriana Bustos was born in Bahia blanca, Province of Buenos Aires in 1965 yet lived most of her adult life in the City of Córdoba, Argentina. She Currently Resides in Buenos Aires. Bustos has exhibited her work extensively participating in over 70 shows, among them Unsettled Lanscapes, Site Santa Fe, USA (2014): the As-If Principle, Magazin4 Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria (2015); the Montevideo and Medellin Biennals and in solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla and León (MUSAC), Spain, 2017 and also at Klemm Foundation, Buenos Aires. She will be participating in the Sarjah Biennal in 2019. Her works are in the collections of museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA) , Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA), National Museum Reina Sogía and ARCO IFEMA Lisbom, Portugal; Asiacity Foundation, Singapour; Casa di Rizparmo Foundation, Modena, Italy, among othe private and public collections