DOUBLE OPENING AT THE MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO: ONOME EKEH AND SOFÍA BOHTLINGK

Onome Ekeh: Especulaciones

The artist was born in the United States and grew up between her native country and Nigeria. She began her career as a painter, turned to design, fell in love with film and, somewhere along the way, became digital and appropriated artificial intelligence. Her work spans film, video, theater, literature and radio.

The exhibition, curated by Victoria Noorthoorn, director of the Modern Museum, will feature Ekeh's last two films, as well as images from her African Jetset (2022), Afropunk, Lagos, 1982 (2022) and Glittering Witness (2024) series. For the occasion, the Museum has transformed its Special Projects Room into a 1980s art cinema.

The works in this exhibition alter the temporal by the use of speculative fiction, reimagining the past according to a chronology that corrects it and projecting possible futures from an African conception. An example of this is African Jetset, a series created in response to the violence and traumatic consequences suffered by African migrations, from slavery to displacement for economic reasons or due to political or social conflicts. In the artist's words: “I wanted to create a space that corrected the past, an alternative timeline in which there had never been any interruption: no slave trade, no colonization, no external war, no plunder. Instead, the continent developed along lines of internal prosperity, allowing Africans to enjoy the abundance of their countries' own natural resources.” In a shamanic twist, this retrospective gaze constitutes the future.

Onome Ekeh currently resides in Basel, Switzerland. She is an artist, curator, as well as a lecturer and panelist specializing in art and technology at various academic and cultural platforms. She has received numerous awards and grants, including the Jerome Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, Turbulence Media Award and the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen grant. She currently lectures on speculative culture in the Master's and Bachelor's programs at the Basel Academy of Art and Design in Switzerland.

Sofía Bohtlingk: El ritmo es el mejor orden

The exhibition brings together a group of recent drawings by Sofía Bohtlingk (Buenos Aires, 1976). For more than a decade, Sofía Bohtlingk's art has responded to her bodily actions. Her paintings and drawings show a bodily rhythm that rigorously becomes brushstroke, line and visual gesture, as if each work were an extension of her body, which needs to extend itself towards the world, embrace it and, in the process, become a medium, a giver of life and art. Sofia's body and that of her art are, in her work, indissoluble, and this union is a founding existential position that allows us to understand her artistic practice.

El ritmo es el mejor orden (Rhythm is the best order) offers a glimpse into the artist's thinking behind the scenes. On this occasion, the Moderno shares with the museum public the intimacy of Sofia's creative process, which emerges from the drawing, as if the artist were opening the curtain of an intimate theater where there is an urgency to do, to not stop, to hold the pulse of the hand and follow the rhythm of the mind without interruptions.

Sofía Bohtlingk (Buenos Aires, 1976) studied painting with Sergio Bazán. Between 2009 and 2010, she attended the Artists Program at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT), directed by Jorge Macchi. Between 2010 and 2011, she was a fellow of the fifth edition of the Kuitca Fellowship, directed by Guillermo Kuitca.