Argentinian art
A vast panorama of Argentinean art, including works by its greatest representatives
Browse collection ›Works by Erica Bohm, Néstor Crovetto, Bruno Dubner, Paulo Fast, Julio Grinblatt, Estefanía Landesmann, Francisca López, Francisco Medail, Andrea Ostera, Colectivo Provisorio Permanente, Gerardo Repetto, Gabriel Valansi y Pablo Ziccarello.
It could be argued that, almost by definition, the word “reflection” belongs to the art of photography. Despite this, it is unusual to see photography reflecting on its own languages and its ways of intervening in the world. Perhaps this rests on the fact that the ‘reflex’ idea of the world with which it was conceived, and which we naturally accept, seals off the possibility of thinking of it as creating its own universes ‒ that is to say, thinking of it as art. Only there where it was possible to question its nature as sustained in varying technical devices, which posit various ways of constructing the real, has the option opened up of dealing with it as a complex artifact whose situation warrants a critical reading for understanding its foundations.
The exhibition Forms of Excess,curated by Verónica Tell, posits a radical deconstruction of the ways in which we understand photography, by stressing the tension between its reproducible nature, its referentiality, its character as a record of visual indices, and its link with time and forms.
Andrés Duprat
Director. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
----------
What is a photograph? What place does the visible image occupy in the definitions of it we may venture? What limits does the device, the apparatus, impose, and how can they be explored and/or contravened? Formulated and thought out in numerous ways, the dimension of thinking about the photographic medium and its specificity has grown considerably in the production of various Argentine artists since the mid-1990s, in the context of the rise of digital photography, which would mark the dematerialization and deterritorialization of the image.
In going back over that series of investigations, the present exhibition gathers together a set of works that have performed operations that compromise the conventional use of various components of photography. These works sound out, at one and the same time, the ways in which, in representing something (or not), photography also exposes itself and represents itself to itself, (re)defining the forms of what it is or can become. In such a setting, excess appears to be simultaneously an experimental method and an aesthetic.
Verónica Tell
Curator