PRESENTATION
{NOTA_BAJADA}

Queremos ver (We want to see)

Starting Saturday 24th of August 2013, Contemporary Space presents the exhibition Queremos Ver, with Rosario Güiraldes as guest curator and interventions by artists Nicolás BacalEduardo BasualdoCarlos Huffmann and Mariana Tellería. This new edition of Contemporary Space carries on with the Proa’s tradition of “contaminating” its architecture non-exhibitory spaces.

According to Güiraldes, the idea of the exhibition is to “explore how artists of a same generation can develop and express similar interests, trying to illustrate the complexities of a new generation, using the interventions on the architecture as an excuse”.

Queremos ver, por Rosario Güiraldes
{NOTA_BAJADA}

Do the sighted know that they see? Do the blind know that they see in a different way? What do we see? Do the eyes see that they see? The ones see and know not that they see. They have eyes and don’t see that they don’t see.
Hélène Cixous

 

In the 13th Century, Thomas Aquinas meditated on Nature during the time of angels and refloated the old notion of aveum as the duration of the souls of humans and divine beings. This duration stood between God’s eternity and the temporal experience of material beings, having a beginning but never an end. The notion may be appropriate to contemplate many types of arte-facts. The works of Nicolás Bacal, Eduardo Basualdo, Carlos Huffmann and Mariana Tellería made for Queremos ver gravitate around this idea, for the knowledge that is produced in art derives from art’s capacity to create time and space without measure or place. It is a blind knowledge that advances without knowing. Knowing how to see is, in consequence, a disillusionment that implies the loss of a short-sightedness.
One of the subjects of Bacal’s work is, precisely, giving time a form. The piece replicates the phenomenon of lightning: it reproduces the instant of estrangement in which the emission of light is dislodged from the sound of thunder, displaying a frozen and open image.
Basualdo’s Decir sí (To say yes), in turn, reflects on the limit as a habitable space and the possibility of remaining in that instant. The pleat is the place in which one can be part of two simultaneous events. It is by seeing that the real is revealed, it is in the interstices of matter that the fault through which the light that outlines the object appears, conjuring blindness and giving way to the work of art.
In Ballet de gigantes (Ballet of giants), Tellería wraps around space creating multiple vanishing points. The alteration of paths forces the interruption of movement through them, creating new maps with coordinates that change the predetermined course of events and inviting to a phenomenological experience of space.
Quince novelas y una guía de usuario (Fifteen novels and a user guide), by Huffmann, takes form within an investigation about intertextuality that separates the categories of reality and hallucination. Nearby, The Bird Encyclopaedia expresses the migratory nature of words. Time as such is only indirectly cognizable through what takes place in it.
Everything is explained by a single moment in time, the events that take place in reality exist in the measure that we recognize their effects. It’s all about of knowing how to see. After all, what do we do when we stand before an artefact? De we see? Do others see what we see?

Exhibition credits
Queremos ver
Artists: Nicolás BacalEduardo BasualdoCarlos Huffmann and Mariana Telleria.
Guest curator: Rosario Güiraldes.
Coordination: Santiago Bengolea.

With thanks to: Teo Wainfred and Eterna (La casa de las escaleras)

With the support of Tenaris – Organización Techint