Mario García Torres
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid
Mario García Torres (Monclava, México, 1975) disembarks in the MNCARS with two installations staged in what used to be the old Sabatini Building coal vaults. Under the enigmatic title “Have you ever seen the snow?”, this young Los Angeles based artist proposes a production in which history is the point of departure to understand the attitude of the general public and of society towards museums, and he analyzes the way in which history has been constructed.
Aligned with the latest trends of Conceptualism, on this occasion García Torres chooses as the starting point for his itinerary the city of Kabul and its past. The first installation, Share-E- Nau Wondering- A Film Treatment, documents a fictitious dia- logue via fax between García Torres and the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti. It illustrates the inquiries and research of the former in pursuit of the One Hotel, an establishment founded by Boetti in the capital of Afghanistan during one of his numerous sojourns prior to the Russian occupation in 1979. This search reveals the current geopolitical situation following the country’s invasion by the United States and, above all, the way in which certain aspects of the city have been modified, or have even disappeared.
On the other hand, the work from which the title of the proposal is taken, created specifically for this exhibition, completes this sort of essay or documentary work on historiography, and why not say so, on photography. This second installation, related to the first, consists of a diaporama accompanied by a voiceover, and it narrates the events that took place in the hotel, a place García Torres never visited, comparing what it must have been in the past and what it is at present, finding a new perspective and explaining the possible implications for its present history, years later.
