Andy Warhol

MEMÓRIAS DA OBSOLESCÊNCIA

This exhibition brings together a collection of works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros collection that have in common the video as a medium. It is a collection of works produced by artists of diverse nationalities and backgrounds, selected for the potential to discuss the medium from which they are used. With a variety of approaches ranging from documentary to fiction to all intermediate hybrid narrative forms, many of the works we present explore the possibility and consequences of incorporating time into the work. Therefore, they are linked to something that happens or happened, the cause and effect of the actions of which they are product, establishing a close relationship with performance, that other means of the contemporary visual arts that introduces the temporal within the materiality of the object in the vision.

The artists that make up the exhibition have several historical references, such as the first experiences with video, which in the 1960s and 1970s were linked to conceptual practices, or to feminist art generally related to the processes of identification of sexual or as well as evidence of interests in the always hybrid complexities of contemporary cultures influenced by anthropological thinking, as well as vindicating the possibilities of intervention in the processes of construction of the history of our time without neglecting the reflections on urban space policies. Finally, they join a very representative group of different approaches not only to video, but also to contemporary artistic production in general.

If one of the intentions of this exhibition is that this set of works give the public of the Paço das Artes a contact with a type of practice, adding to the opportunities to share it and, in this sense, we hope that since this presentation is fulfilled the role of disseminator, we also want to highlight in the selection a common interest in questioning and highlighting the specificities of the environment. Therefore, we use as a main reference for this curatorial proposal a historical text by Rosalind Krauss [1] in which she rightly argues that, if, on the one hand, video (like any other medium) is, in principle, exempt from an internal logic that can distinguish it with theoretical and historical precision from other means, too, Krauss assures, is a medium that, by the time of its emergence within the history of art, places in a permanent and contradictory game its relations of identity with their equivalents, be it painting, sculpture, drawing, photography or any other attempt to characterize artistic practices according to the means by which artists decide to express their ideas. In short, video, as well as installation, performance or digital media, in this play of denial and affirmation before traditional media, looks at itself constantly, but without the possibility of those of creating a reflexive distance between object and subject, what Krauss calls "the aesthetics of narcissism." It is, to put it another way, a continuous medium of present, in which the whole past becomes obsolete. That is why we wanted to give the exhibition the title Memories of obsolescence, memories of the video observing itself, building and destroying the boundaries that define it.

Jesús Fuenmayor

Diretor e curador-geral da Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO)