Joaquín Segura .- Estado de excepción
01/Feb/2014 - 29/Mar/2014
Espacio Mínimo gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Spain of Mexican artist JOAQUÍN SEGURA. Mexican curator Mariana David writes the following about the selection of works that conform the show:
“And it doesn’t matter which are the moral boundaries or the conventions that need to be broken, if it is necessary to shatter the order so as to show a nebulous part of the human imagination; to do it is almost an obligation”
Guillermo Fadanelli
(“El arte de la insolencia”. Día Siete no.48, 2009, Ciudad de México, p. 21. Reflections on the work of Joaquín Segura)
The present global scenario has citizens worldwide concerned about the economic policies that keep on restricting civil rights everywhere while devastating life in the planet at the same time. Images of gunfights and bombings in the news are placed among endless advertising urging you to buy a car or bifidus yoghurt. While walking the street of cities severely affected by unemployment, like Madrid, one questions oneself: Where are people getting money from to keep on consuming? This happens in Spain, Mexico and Jakarta, crisis it is not exclusive of any particular country. Each nation’s problems are intrinsically tied to the interests of hegemonic power that knows no frontiers. This is whyJoaquín Segura considers nostalgic to talk about national identity, and refers to the concept of post-nation as a branding process that aims to create a false idea of integration.
Interested in the nature of power and, specifically, in the rise and fall of political and ideological apparatus, his work delves into the fissures and contradictions that have precisely made these structures collapse. However, far from pretending to vindicate or exalt subversion, the work of Segura confronts the viewer with its own ghosts. His artistic output makes us face a paradox: everything can be negated, destroyed or erased. From Czech dissidence during the Soviet Bloc era to the existence of the Frente Popular Farabundo Martí in El Salvador, what appears to remain about these conflicts are mere documents that the artist reproduces transforming them in works of art. Thus, its political content becomes diluted transfigured into added-value objects. Act of provocation? It strongly depends on where the viewer positions itself.
Segura recurs to micro-narratives to evidence what he terms “the triumph of failure”, which directly refers on one hand to the rise and fall of any ideological construct that denies reality, and on the other, to every revolutionary act in an ample sociopolitical arena. In the work “Estudio material sobre revuelta #1” (2014), objects used as projectiles in Mexico City’s recent public demonstrations, later collected,are photographed in the manner of an ethnographic catalogue. The result alludes to the historical fetish qualities that these artifacts suddenly acquire, but also appeals to the inescapable unavoidability of hegemonic power that questions the effectiveness of street protest.
The strategy of translation and its subsequent loss of meaning is another resource used by the artist,which becomes clear in works such as “Los anarquistas y las bombas” (2013), where a woman interprets –in sign language- a text published in 1907 in the anarchist gazette “Tierra y Libertad”. The format generates disaffection between the portrayed content and the hearing public, while the anarcho-syndicalist slogans are reduced to mere gestures in a monitor.
Even while Segura affirms that his practices trives to “create distance and see things from outside”, an involvement is always present in his desire to collect random symbols and moments from political history, whether it may only be generated by the simple fact of rescuing events lost in major History.
This exhibition brings together a selection of works, some of which were created since 2011 while others were specifically developed for this show, offering a mental panorama of uneasiness that, in the best case, will allow us to envision routes of escape from the permanent state of exception in which we all live.
JOAQUIN SEGURA (Mexico City, 1980) Visual artist. Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. Hisaction, installation, intervention and photographic work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, USA, Europe and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, La Panaderia and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, along with El Museo del Barrio, Anthology Film Archives, White Box and apexart (New York, NY),
LA><ART, MoLAA (Los Angeles, CA) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain), National Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX.His work has been widely reviewed & featured in local and international art publications & major newspapers such as Flash Art, Adbusters, Art Papers, Código, Art Nexus, Discipline, Celeste & The Washington Post, among many others. In 2008/09, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International
Studio & Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. In2012/13, he undertook artistic residencies and research stays at Hangar –Centre de Producció I Recercad‘Arts Visuals (Barcelona, Spain),MeetFactory – International Center of Contemporary Art (Prague, Czech Republic) and Impakt Foundation (Utrecht, Netherlands). He’s a founding member and board advisor of SOMA, Mexico City.
