Buenos Aires
About the exhibition

Starting Saturday 24th of August at 12 am, Fundación Proa presents Buenos Aires, an exhibition that revisits the visual, literary, cinematic, plastic and performance art appropriations created by different eras during key moments in the city’s history. Based on the visual aspects, retrieving valuable archive materials and at the same time attending to contemporary expressions, the exhibition seeks to present the various imaginaries that tried to comprehend the incessant process of urban transformation.

Buenos Aires reflects upon the concept of the 21st Century city, looking back on the notion of metropolis consolidated throughout the previous century and forwarding today’s city as a space for different artistic expressions. The exhibition takes the notion of ‘fragment’ as typical of the city’s experience, of its permanent change, its infinite chaos, and displays itself travelling back and forth through time, emphasizing artistic works that elaborated on their experience of Buenos Aires.

Displayed as a great constellation, as a fragmentary yet univocal figure, Buenos Aires gathers a wide array of materials that take us back to the city’s origins without losing sight of its present. From the ambiguity of the first representations, born before and during colonial times, passing through the vibrant modernization processes of the late 19th Century and arriving at its contemporary expressions, the exhibition shows the different artistic forms that, in each particular context, fabricated images of the city. In these works, and in the potential relationships that can be established between them, rest the aspirations, dreams, frustrations and hopes that each era imagined for itself.

Throughout its four galleries, Buenos Aires traces an itinerary in which different eras dialogue with different artistic formats. The colonial representations of a Buenos Aires that was not yet a city confront the images of its present. Following is the characterization done by the modernization process of the 30s, whose most emblematic symbol is the construction of the Obelisco and the constant changes of the Plaza de la República. In a “sound installation”, the urban imaginaries that literature has created about Buenos Aires in the present and the past; and a projection that reflects on the relationship between urban space and cinematic language. Finally, the drafts of the city’s architecture in a possible future, along with different urban interventions that throughout its history have questioned the notion of public space.

“Starting in present Buenos Aires, we engage the images of the city across time and across the multiple viewpoints of photographers, filmmakers, artists, writers, video artists, architects. The city as a protagonist of the most diverse representations”, says Cecilia Rabossi, art historian and lead investigator of the interdisciplinary research team that designed the exhibition and whose members include writer, essayist and teacher Daniel Link, actor and playwright Martín Seijó; photographer and collector Facundo de Zuviría, and film investigator Andrés Levinson.

Buenos Aires presents the city as a habitat, as a stage for actions and contradictions and, in particular, as portrayed by appropriations that analyze it, recreate it or that simply take it by storm. The exhibition presents a city activated by artists that, within their different disciplines, act on the public space, seizing its geography and its circulation, or indicating its constructive, demographic and migratory changes.

Buenos Aires is sponsored by Tenaris – Organización Techint; its concept, planning and production were developed Fundación Proa.

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