ART-TRIBUTE:Atopia. Migration, Heritage and Placelessness
Atopia, a word mainly used in medicine and philosophy, literally means placelessness, out of place, unclassifiable and of high originality. It is, in its traditional use, at the same time, a category of otherness, difference, expulsion and exclusion, as it is a reference to the ineffable, the pristine, and the absolute. It is in this double connotation, in which the term becomes a productive figure for thinking in addressing the various ways in which artists have dealt with ideas of place, geography, migration, heritage, translation, the crossing of national, social and cultural borders.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: TBA21 Archive
The exhibition “Atopia: Migration, Heritage and Placelessness” presents works from the collection of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, using the concept of the “atopic”, to challenge the orthodoxy of space and site and to freshly engage with a discoursive body of research that has long been determined by the notions of center, off-center, the local, the marginal and the periphery. The past decades were marked by astounding social, political, and cultural re-alignments: the changing of borders, the displacement of people, the reformulation and reassertion of national particularities and identities: all these spatial redistributions have had an increasing impact on artistic and curatorial practices. The exhibition proposes a notion of a shattered spatiality, marked by recent events, realignments, and speculations to trace the growing interest in place-specific narratives, dealing symbolically with the gaps and slippages between topos and atopos, space and non-space, the global and the specific practices of cultural in-betweens and hybridization. Thus the exhibition focuses on the practices and representations of the ways in which artists have accessed, rehearsed, participated in and negotiated concepts of “place” or “place of origin”, their past, heritage, and cultural ambiguities, with all the dilemmas such notions provoke. What seems to be just a geographic denotation, comes with an apparatus of definitions and is grounded in systems of authority. Artistic exploration of geographies through mappings, landscapes, descriptions of sites, places, collection of cultural objects, historical inscriptions and personal research, as well as the shifting political implications in language, writing and formal representation are at the nexus of the current exploration. The exhibition looks at the countersides of the processes of aggregation and homogenization and addresses the ways in which a collection of 21st Century art is constructed around the various experiences of difference, in which individuals and collectives participate in different cultural processes and realities. The way “localism” is understood in this particular context is not as a reaffirmation of common simplifications but is instead based on productive inquiries and internalization of paradoxes and transitions, which evade categorizations or nostalgic impulses. It also shows how shifting political and economic realities have created new tales of places, and how their histories have sparked the impulse to document the rapid processes of transformation set into motion by new “continental shifts”. In the exhibition are presented works by: Allora & Calzadilla, Jonathas de Andrade, Taysir Batniji, John Bock, Monica Bonvicini, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mario García-Torres, Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad, Mathilde ter Heijne, Sanja Iveković, Brad Kahlhamer, Los Carpinteros, Paulo Nazareth, Rivane Neuenschwander, Walid Raad/The Atlas Group, Alex Rodríguez, Paul Rosero Contreras, Allan Sekula, and Do Ho Suh.
Info: Curators: Daniela Zyman &Valentina Gutiérrez Turbay, Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Gabriel García Moreno, Sebastián de Benalcázar, Quito, Duration: 10/8-2/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 9:00-17:30, www.centroculturalq.quito.gob.ec
