Re(cámaras): Espacios para una fotografía extendida.
Casa de Moneda – Banco de la República. Bogota
From 11 August through 27 October, 2010, the Mint of the Bank of the Republic is hosting the temporary exhibition “Re(cámaras): Espacios para una fotografía extendida”, curated by María Wills Londoño. This show features some works by contemporary artists from Colombia, Cuba and South Africa, most of which belong to the Bank of the Republic’s Art Collection but, for reasons of space, they are kept in reserve.
The list of artists is not homogeneous. Different generations and interests coexist in the exhibition space. In this respect, the work by Miguel Ángel Rojas (an artist born in 1946) entitled David, features a soldier with a mutilated leg, posing in the manner of Michelangelo’s David. The work of Rojas, who became a well-known figure in the panorama of contemporary Colombian art since the 1970s due to his recurring references to vio- lence, drug trafficking, the male body and homo eroticism, is viewed alongside the phantasmagoric installations of Angélica Teuta (b.1985), a young artist whose work appears to break with the two dimensions of the photo- graphic plane, playing with stereoscopic vision, light, space and movement.
For his part, Nelson Vergara presents on three small TV screens placed consecutively and framed like photographs, three almost static videos of mooralnd landscapes in which nature’s perenniality is revealed by the light and soft mist that emerges from the piedmont. This work, midway between photography and video, presents one of the blurred boundaries that characterize the artist’s work.Vergara has adopted the decision not to hide the video aspect by allowing the electric wiring to be seen.
Including diverse concerns such as the sculptural character of photography, the two-dimensional rendering of actions taking place in time, and the dialogue between the documentary and the artificial, the exhibition gathers together key works by Colombian artists such as Fernell Franco, Juan Fernando Herrán, Dionisio Cortés, Oscar Muñoz, Fernando Arias, Rosario López, María Elvira Escallón, Liliana Angulo, Gloria Posada and Víctor Robledo, providing visibility to some of the new frontiers of contemporary photography and establishing a dialogue with international artists such as the Cuban Carlos Garaicoa and the South African William Kentridge. Beyond the aforementioned, the exhibition reveals the good eye, sensible criterion and seriousness with which the Bank of the Republic’s Collection has managed its art acquisitions program.
