Mexico City
2013
Artists:
Nina Beier
Roisin Byrne
José Luis Cortés
Laurent Grasso
Christodoulos Panayotiou
Trevor Paglen
Tania Pérez Córdova
Ulla von Brandenburg
Press:
Excelsior
e-flux
Un viaje a la luna
In July 1969, the Apollo 11 space shuttle was launched into outer space with the Moon as its final destination. Two of its crew members would become the first men to step foot on this satellite. However, an endless number of theories quickly emerged, denying the veracity of this historic affair.The same event, the human arrival on the Moon, is the theme for Georges Méliès' short feature film Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902). Inspired by the same-titled short story by Jules Verne, this blatant montage –and the first fiction film ever made– shows what a profitable disadvantage the complete ignorance of the behavior of objects and the human body on the Moon's surface was. This representation crisis stimulated the imagination and creativity to depict how this new surrounding, a new reality, could be.
This exhibition is traced upon the limit of the tension provoked by both moments of the same event, and it wishes to explore to a certain degree the aesthetic encounter, that is, how a spectator reacts when facing the uncertainty produced by an object or situation. The body of work of the featured artists is constructed through images and objects of an indexical nature; they tend to eradicate the primacy of the artwork as an immediate source of experience and relegate its physical presence to the background. The works brought together in this selection are traces of something that may have never occurred; they are suspended in a state that oscillates between purely documentary and strictly fictional. Through different media, the eight summoned artists offer different propositions on how the opening of an aesthetic space involves the opening of a political one.
Framed under the exhibition's theoretical umbrella, artist Trevor Paglen was invited to deliver his acclaimed lecture The Last Pictures. This multimedia presentation stems from a five-year research process in which Paglen interviewed scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, artists, and practitioners from other fields about the profound contradictions that shape contemporary civilizations. The hundred images it contains, selected through the long process of inquiring about what a cultural mark should be, are inspired by questioning the relation between vision, knowledge, and power.