Curated by Gabi Ngcobo and the curatorial team of Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Serubiri Moses, Thiago de Paula Souza, and Yvette Mutumba. Johanna Unzueta's work is exhibited at Akademie Der Kunste and ZK/U. Exhibitions run from June 9 to September 9, 2018.
"CIRCLES WITHOUT DIAMETER AND FANTASIES WITHOUT HISTORY"
Group show with Felipe Mujica, Cristóbal Lehyt, Cristian Silva, Joe Villablanca, Juan Cespedes, Milena Gröpper and Johanna Unzueta.
May 17 - June 10, 2018
Circles Without Diameter, Fantasies Without History
Summer evenings in Santiago, Chile, are very nice. The hot day finally cools off and one can relax with friends, outdoors, under a tree, and if you are lucky there is a cool breeze. You get some beers, some improvised snacks, and chat and laugh like it was 1996. This happened to me recently when I was spending some time with family around the Christmas holidays and also preparing a show. That night my friend X and my friend Y disappeared into the house for about 10 minutes to later rejoin the party but with a handmade note, a drawing, which was also a formal proposition for the title of the show that X and Y, together with Z and V and A and B and myself were planning. Now, this planning was never a real plan, yet more a communion of intentions, of energies, of a specific shared history that at the same time is constantly trying to project itself into the future. The title then: Circles Without Diameter, Fantasies Without History. It convinced me on the spot. It was geometrical and personal, somehow pessimistic yet funny and absurd, a poetic statement that made no sense, or better said, just confused me, and I like confusion, I think it’s a very productive method.
X, Y, Z, V, A, B and myself could be characters of a short story by Roberto Bolaño, but no, in this case we are just artists that share a specific history of the 1990’s in Chile: The post-dictatorship generation, who was there – far away behind the Andes Mountains – at the birth of The Internet, who learned art through photocopying books and magazines, and who shared musical and pop-cultural interests. I would love for us to be characters of a Bolaño short story but our lives are not that interesting or wired. Some of us did travel, explored new contexts, specifically New York City, and that is how A, B and myself live there and X, Y, Z, and V live in Santiago. We inform each other about local stuff. We process locally and from the other part, yet at one point the origin and the destination get confused. We also make long and short-term alliances… It is not perfect. Some of us live in small apartments and others at the edge of a mountain, in ex-hippie communities, some are intrepid nomads and others finally settled nicely and wake up looking at the Empire State Building every morning.
The works of X, Y, Z, V, A, B and myself really do not have much in common but somehow they get along. Its like they share a dark strategy, or maybe just a directness and simplicity that has not been affected by the production schemes of the mega art world. Each one contains its own poetic intentions and is happy to share space with his/her peers, to be contaminated by them, their meanings affected, slightly different when singing together.
For the exhibition at Anna Elle Gallery V, B and myself will be present. I would like us to make Pisco Sour for the opening. Long live our Peruvian friends! Vivan Los Incas! Vivan los pueblos originarios de America!
"NICTINASTIA", Mural Project at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Ciudad de México.
Oil stick, metal rods and PVC rope. November 2017 - April 2018.
Installation-panoramic view at Jewett Art Gallery, Wellesley College, MA
"Nodes, Encounter... Out of the Fields", Jewett Art Gallery, Wellesley College, MA
Solo show by Johanna Unzueta at Jewett Art Gallery, Wellesley College, MA
February 16 - March 9, 2017
https://www.wellesley.edu/art/resources/jewett
KULTURØYA, STAVANGER
Kulturøya was a residency and exhibition organized by Leva Urban Design at Sølyst in Stavanger, Norway, with Songül Boyraz, Peter Höll, Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta.
February 19-25, 2007
Installation view at Greengassi, London. Exhibition organized by Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala) for Condo 2017.
These Architectures We Make |Proyectos Ultravioleta at Greengassi GALLERY, London
"These Architectures We Make", group show with Felipe Mujica, Elizabeth Wild, Guiseppe Gabellone, Karin Ruggaber, Johanna Unzueta and Naufus Ramirez Figueroa.
January 14 - March 04, 2017 | Greengassi Gallery, London
www.greengrassi.com | www.condocomplex.org
La Liberte sans nom | Installation views
Drawings framed in acrylic panels mounted on wooden bases, alongside Felipe Mujica's movable wall curtains. With Sven Augustijnen, Nicolas Clair, Fernand Deligny-Frédéric Dialynas Sanchez with input from Lê Cửu and Sébastien Leseigneur, Vidya Gastaldon, Beatrice Gibson, Daniel Jacoby and Irene Kopelman. Curated by Elfi Turpin.
CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France
October 16, 2006, to January 15, 2017
Photos by Aurélien Mole and courtesy of CRAC Alsace
www.cracalsace.com
Installation view "El jardín de Psyche", Courtesy Galería Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile
El jardín de Psyche | Catalog Release
Catalog soon to be published by Galería Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile. With texts by Laura Wellen and Cristóbal Lehyt.
Carmen Beuchat, Two not One, 1975, New York. Photo by Susan Rutman. Courtesy Carmen Beuchat Archive.
Embodied Absence: Chilean Art of the 1970s Now | Group exhibition
EMBODIED ABSENCE: CHILEAN ART OF THE 1970S NOW
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Opening Reception: Oct 27, 2016, 5:30–7:30 pm
6 pm: Carmen Beuchat: Two not One II, 2016
Exhibition + Performances: Oct 27, 2016–Jan 8, 2017 | Level 1 + 3
Responding to the coup d’état and its aftermath in the 1970s, Chilean artists residing in Santiago and abroad created works that spoke to their experience of political, social, and geographic marginalization. They developed highly coded languages to evade censorship, exhibited work in public space in lieu of institutional support, and formed independently run galleries and artist collectives to protect their individual identities. The results were frequently ephemeral works that utilized the human body and impermanent materials as primary mediums, thus disappearing following initial presentations and interventions.
Embodied Absence: Chilean Art of the 1970s Now brings works of art and documentation from this historic period into dialogue with new performances and collaborations with contemporary Chilean artists of a younger generation. The exhibition forefronts the challenges of historicizing elusive artworks by presenting works that take photographic and video documentation and human memory as points of departure, reactivating, rearticulating and witnessing the interventions and works through the lens of the contemporary moment.
Works by UNAC (Unión por la Cultura), CADA (Colectivo de acciones de arte), Elías Adasme, Carmen Beuchat, Francisco Copello, Luz Donoso, Juan Downey, Carlos Leppe, Catalina Parra, Lotty Rosenfeld, Cecilia Vicuña and Raúl Zurita, with Cristóbal Lehyt, Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta.
Guest curated by Liz Munsell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & Special Initiatives, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and visiting curator, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University (DRCLAS).
This exhibition is co-organized with DRCLAS, based on their research project Conceptual Stumblings. Exhibition and program support is also provided by Harvard University Committee on the Arts. The first iteration, Embodied Absence: Ephemerality and Collectivity in Chilean Art of the 1970s (Sep 2015–Jan 2016), was organized by Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile with their substantial support in research and production of works, in collaboration with DRCLAS.
May 2016 NY. 2016 - Charcoal, pastel pencil and watercolor on tinted (fustic) and perforated paper. 65 x 100 cm.
La Liberté sans nom | group exhibition
LA LIBERTÉ SANS NOM, CRAC Alsace, France
Opening brunch October 16 at 11.30 am
Exhibition from October 16, 2016 to January 15, 2017
With Sven Augustijnen, Nicolas Clair, Fernand Deligny-Frédéric Dialynas Sanchez with input from Lê Cửu and Sébastien Leseigneur, Vidya Gastaldon, Beatrice Gibson, Daniel Jacoby, Irene Kopelman, Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta. Curated by Elfi Turpin.
In the late 1960s, in the space-time void of the Cévennes region, French poet and pedagogue Fernand Deligny established a territory for autistic children and their speaking carers. In doing so he set up the context for hitherto unheard of events through the interweaving of unpremeditated relationships between all concerned.
In order to observe and grasp this process, Deligny used as recording tools not only film, but also drawing; the latter enabled the mapping onto this territory of the trajectories, acts and spatial displacements of the mute subjects and their speaking educators. These maps, known as the Lignes d’erre du réseau des Cévennes (the Cévennes Network Wander Lines), built a way of seeing on strata of silent, invisible relationships, instead of traversing them blindly. The point was to avoid misunderstandings and to enter the children's field of vision in a way that enabled a communal life outside of language.
Deligny's original contribution was "to do without doing": to make possible – with no prior suppositions, imaginings or ideations – modes of being conducive to the surfacing of reality. A tricky matter which, over and above experimental education and alternative experiences of transmission, bears directly on this exhibition: one intended to be free, and devoid of presupposition, and to this end convening artists who themselves also tend to bring an unimaginable reality to the surface.
What goes on in an exhibition? What goes on between its inhabitants? Between the artists, the works, the curators, the carers, and the visitors with their myriad language registers? How to avoid crushing its developing, invisible relationships? How to avoid ploughing blindly through an exhibition? How to enter the field of vision of the works? How to live outside of language?
E.T., September 2016.
* La liberté sans nom (Nameless Freedom) is the title of an essay in Fernand Deligny, L’Arachnéen et autres textes (Paris: Editions L’Arachnéen, 2008).