Ocurrences

November 2005

Artists Crossroads

Curated by Milagros Bello and Andreina Fuentes October

During the Chicago Artist’s month in the Klima building & Sydiart Studio Chicago, USA

The exhibition “Occurrences: Artist’s Crossroads” partly sponsored by Hardcore Art Contemporary, featured more than fifty artists from different nationalities and cultural backgrounds. The show was structured around the hardcore category reviewing crucial axes of contemporary art, which is concentrated in a new type of activism. It explored collective memories, feminine politics, private/public, the Self and its political masks. It included site-specific installations, digital photography, video installations, photo murals  installed on the spaces of the Klima Building and in the Sydiart Studio in the hot Pilsen gallery zone of Chicago. The participant artists worked on architectural interventions, either aerial or on the ground of the building, with indoor and outdoor installations. The artist works “invaded” underestimated places such as halls, doors, windows, corners, and façade of the building. The artists, based in seven cities, conveyed polymorphic and trans-cultural view, and provoked new visual strategies and metaphors. From a geographical crossroads, they came from Houston, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Bogota and Caracas, recasting their backgrounds and their identities. The artworks focused on deconstructing contemporary myths of the local/global identity, consumerism and the market place, form and content, banal/transcendental, trans-gender zones, the war, and the social imaginary. Three performances took place the night of the opening: Nina Dotti – “The Wedding Cake” – as a bride, treated the public from a real four-tier high wedding cake, and she “married” the people in the surrounding streets with gold rings. Sylvia Riquezes – “The Blob is Back” – with massive red balls intervened the building’s façade and the sidewalk. Nela Ochoa – “I Could Be You Could Be Me” – with a sociological statement, dressed as a homeless person and roaming the surrounding streets, approaching people to give them a paper with the phrase: “I Could Be You Could Be Me”, and entered them into the galleries to the surprise and sometimes rejection of the public. The performance was filmed.

This exhibition was conceived to travel to other art spaces. Currently is being prepared to be installed in Caracas, Venezuela.