August 7. Artist: Leandro Katz

Next Saturday is devoted to an encounter with artist Leandro Katz at Imán: New York (Magnet: New York) galleries together with researcher Ana Longoni. From 3PM, his films Splits (1978) and The visit (1986) can be seen at the Auditorium. At 6.30PM, Katz will present the films and dialogue with the public on New York’s artistic scene, city where he lived for over three decades. 

Program
 3PM. Splits (1978) / The visit (1986)
4PM. Splits (1978) / The visit (1986)
5PM. Artists + Critics: Leandro Katz and Ana Longoni visit Imán: New York exhibition (+ info>>)
6.30PM. Splits (1978) / The visit (1986) projection and conversation with Leandro Katz.

Artists + Critics is a program that consolidates exhibition to exhibition. Imán: New York’s exhibited artists visit the exhibition together with the attending audience and a renowned art specialist. In this occasion, accompanied by Ana Longoni, Leandro Katz will reflect upon his life in the Big Apple where he developed most of his trajectory as an artist and teacher in renowned American colleges. His alternative experiences, the performances, his relation to eastern culture and his pass through conceptual art provide the highlights of his career.

After the guided tour of the exhibition and looking to get an in deph analysis on Katz artistic trajectory, Proa’s Auditorium will show his cinematographic works Splits, 1978 y The visit, 1986. At the end of the show, the artist will once again meet the audience for conversation.

Katz’s Project for the day you will love, a series of photographs and documentary film on the research he conducted on the last image taken of Che Guevara at his death in Bolivia, is currently displayed at Proa’s Library. (+ info >>).

Leandro Katz, born in Buenos Aires in 1938, is a visual artist, a writer and a filmmaker, mainly known for his films and his photographic installations. An American/Argentine artist, he has lived in New York from 1965 until 2006, where he conducted creative and academic activities. He has been a member of the faculty at the School of Visual Arts, Brown University and William Paterson University. He currently lives in Buenos Aires.

His works include long-term projects dealing with Latin American subjects that incorporate historical research, anthropology and visual arts. These include The Catherwood Project, a photographic reconstruction of the two 1850's expeditions of Stephens and Catherwood to the Maya areas of Central America and Mexico, Project For The Day You'll Love Me, which investigates the events around the capture and execution of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, Paradox, which deals with Central American archaeology and the banana plantations in the Maya region, Vortex, which -following the classic novel La Vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera- addresses the social and literary history of the rubber industry in the Amazon region of the Putumayo River, and Tania, Masks and Trophies, a project that examines the figure of Tamara Bunker, the only woman who fought together with Ernesto Che Guevara in his last campaign of 1967.

Leandro Katz has produced many artists' books and seventeen narrative and non-narrative films. His latest artist's book dealing with matters of time and daily life, S(h)elf Portrait, was published in Buenos Aires in 2008. His most recent books, Natural History, and The Ghosts of Ñancahuazú, were published in 2010.  Recent exhibitions (2010) include Natural History (Henrique Faría Gallery, NY), Imán-New York (Proa, Buenos Aires), and 10,000 Lives - Gwangju Biennale, Korea.

For his work, he has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, USA, and the Hubert Bals Fund, Holland, among many others.

Ana Longoni is a writer, researcher for CONICET and a professor of Theory of Media and Culture in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Doctor of Arts (UBA), dictates graduate seminars at  UBA and  PEI-MACBA (Barcelona) on the intersections between art and politics in Argentina and Latin America. She directs the research group Culture as resistance: Readings from the transition from cultural and artistic productions during the last dictatorship in Argentina. She is part of the Southern Conceptual Network since its founding in 2007. She has published individual and collaborative books, such as From the Damned Poets to the Video clips (Buenos Aires, Pitcher, 1998), Del Di Tella a Tucumán Arde (Buenos Aires), Heaven for assault (2000, 2nd edition Eudeba, 2008), the preliminary study of Oscar Masotta book, Revolution in Art (Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2004), she collaborated in one of the chapters in the anthology edited by I. Katzenstein, Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the Sixties: Writings of the Avant-Garde (New York, MoMA, 2004), Betrayal. The figure of the traitor in the stories on the survivors of the repression (Buenos Aires, Norma, 2007), and the collective volumes The Siluetazo (Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2008) and Southern Conceptualisms (São Paulo, Annablume , 2009). Her play La Chira was released in 2004, directed by Ana Alvarado, and was included in the anthology edited by Jorge Dubatti, New Argentinean theater: drama(s), La Havana, La Honda, 2007. Trees, another play, was released in Buenos Aires under her direction in 2006. She is a member of the editorial board for the Ramona, Ojos Cureles and Des-edges journals.