kilpatrih

Imagination and intuition are vital to our understanding - CJ

[kilpatrih]

The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris invites contemporary artists to stage installations throughout the grounds of the natural history museum giving artists the perfect backdrop to react to our historical understand of the environment and nature.

Musee’s most recently hosted the work of ceramicist Lin Utzon. As a Danish artist, she is inspired by the North with its arctic stillness for her pieces, which have towering, twisting forms in the courtyard and congregated spheres like a cloud alongside the taxidermy, all in black and white. She hopes this work  will convey a diversity in means of expression that has helped mold her contemplative vision of the world- formed through exposure to the large spaces of the Northern (Greenland) and Southern (Australia, America) hemispheres. The 350 black and white paintings and ceramic installations are spread throughout the “hunting lodge” aesthetic of the Musee, intervening as a “breath of primal cold”.

A few years ago, Artist Abraham Pointcheval lived inside a taxidermy bear for 13 days. Lest you imagine him walking the bear around like a Disney-Character suit, he was reclining in a special compartment built into the taxidermy animal in a small enclosure which was fully equipped with all the basic necessities including food, water, a charging dock and even a “provision to relieve himself”.  He viewed this act as a way to mimic the animal’s hibernation and aiming at “understanding and challenging his physical & mental boundaries while experiencing “animal nature”.

I think of these works as interventions not only in the incredibly stayed environment of this European natural history museum, but of the human in nature. The way that these contemporary global artists are invited to create something new in the space is reminiscent of Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum. It shows a strategy for contemporary artists to make work in reaction to the “old guard” institutions and challenge their original missions by inserting new global context in the environment. 

[kilpatrih]

“Art Hack Day is an internet-based nonprofit dedicated to hackers whose medium is art and artists whose medium is tech.  We believe in non-utilitarian beauty through technology and its ability to affect social change for public good.” (arthackday.net)

Art Hack Day is a grass-roots initiative of co-organizers from art-tech spaces around the world that hosts a 48 hour annual event where 60 artist-hackers and hacker-artists are invited to create works in a shared space. The event begins with “a meet & greet where we provide good food, fast Internet, and equipment for collaborating on and creating new work.” Depending on the location, 500-1000 visitors come through the space to see the work being built and experience interactive works and demonstrations. Some examples of the work created at Art Hack Day include:

Sabrina Basten, Audrey Samson {Roger10-4}

Field Sweeper, Inc.

Field Sweeper Inc. detects and makes audible electro-magnetic fields. Through mountains of electronic waste the field sweeper suit enables the scavenger to find the last bit of surviving electronics, listening for the last peeps of these devices.

  Bengt Sjölén, Nicklas Marelius

Data Retention - Resurrection

A hard-disk from a disposed computer, once sold and used in Europe, then shipped to Nigeria and dumped in an e-waste landfill, is brought back from the dead and its content displayed in a stream of documents, images and internet caches revealing the trails of its former life.

  Dennis de Bel

S.M.S: Smoke Messaging Service

Smoke is one of the earliest technologies for long distance visual communication. This iPhone addon offers you the advantages of ancient technology TODAY! Features: free, no subscription, autonomous, not dependant on existing infrastructure, location based long distance visual communication, nsa proof protocol  social: one has to agree on a protocol in person in order to start communication, chaining to cover longdistances (chinese 750km, great wall)

  Exonemo

exonemo.com/fireplace

Once upon a time, the hearth was the heart of the home. Now there’s a TV in its place, where you can watch a perfect fireplace 24/7. With “smart” devices that too will soon disappear, to be consumed from our palms. Consider this our contribution to such progress. A bonfire for all of the keyboards, mouses, of a now lost legacy. A new iteration of the fireplace to warm our restless souls.

  This kind of technological interchange is a direct result of globalization and its invention of a shared culture and language. The collaborations at this event are cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural but speak to a shared reality (or virtual reality). This event embodies the kind of DIY invention/making/dialogue that is shared globally in countries with access to technology. 

[kilpatrih]

Whatever the problem, wherever in the world, two undeniable glaring needs often take center stage: food and shelter. Climate change and economic crisis have shone a particularly harsh light on these needs and those in danger from lack of them. Contemporary artists interested in these basic human needs have responded by creating works that address the base necessity of all humans for these things. Encapsulated in their work is: hopefulness, despair, absurdity, and ingenuity.

Urs Fischer’s Bread House is a temporal send-up of these basic human needs. It is a shell that reminds us of our own fragile balance between life and mortality.

Gregory Kloehn takes a hands-on approach to the problem of shelter hoping that his efforts will accumulate to make a difference in the lives of those lacking shelter. By building tiny portable houses, he brings his skills to salvaged materials to create nomadic shelters for homeless urban dwellers.

Michael Rakowitz does the same, perhaps even more efficiently, by creating inflatable structures that hook onto the Hvac air exchanges of buildings, providing not only shelter but heat as well. Rakowitz’s paraSITE designs are collapsible and weigh very little making them more easily transportable. This work could be seen as a nod to José Miguel de Prada Poole’s Instant City in Ibiza in 1971.

AFFECT-T is a group of architects who have designed tiny bamboo dwellings as a reaction to the extremely cramped living conditions in Hong Kong.  With 7 million people living within a little over 400 square miles, the lack of shelter in Hong Kong has led to people living in closet-sized “cage houses”. AFFECT-T has designed modular bamboo homes that can be built as a mini-neighborhood inside old factories and other former industrial buildings. The homes feature movable bamboo panels, allowing for customized spaces and 2-story living.

Tomas Saraceno builds inflatable pods that dangle in a web of interconnected supports. Some serve as play and living spaces, some as greenhouses. He sees these as a commentary on future dwelling, addressing both the need for shelter and food, but also drawing attention to clean atmosphere as part of the construct. 

[kilpatrih]

Meet artist Shae Hembrey. Hembrey is famous for a biennial he created in 2011 called SEEK: 100 in 2011. The most important thing to know about seek is that it featured the work of 100 contemporary artists from all over the world. And, Hembrey himself is all 100 artists.

Gimmicky, I know. Also, incredible. Incredible that one artist could create 100 points of views, biographies, interests and physical works. All that remains today of the 2011 biennial is a 412-page catalogue that documents all 100 pieces.  "The biennial catalog is itself a sort of meta-piece of art, and the artists represented are really only one artist — a guy who has chosen to bifurcate and fracture and channel himself in a hundred different ways. " (nytimes.com)

Whatever you think of Hembrey's tactics, subsequent fame, or the quality of the works;the one thing Hembrey's biennial does well is to showcase the artifice of the biennial and the strategies of contemporary artists working in the framework of biennial culture. 

While Hembrey himself dons an 'aw-shucks-maam' demeanor that relies heavily on his Southern US upbringing to endear his works to viewers as a critique of his disappointment over his visit to the 2007 Documenta biennial which he describes as "poorly constructed, deliberately controversial work, paired with artist statements that threw around fuzzy, self-important words like “diaspora” and “postmodern."

If one moves beyond this origin story to examine the work itself, some of it will feel affected and over-the-top. But  also, it will raise some interesting questions about how a biennial selects artworks, frames them for consideration, and how one artist could capitalize on his privileged white american status to invent a tongue-in-cheek biennial. 

[kilpatrih]

Dutch by birth, artist Mella Jaarsma left Nederland for Indonesia as a young adult to study at the Art Institute of Jakarta, and stayed to live and work there for over 25 years. She cites living abroad as heightening her awareness of her own cultures normative standards and cultural biases. “What we consider to be reality comes to us by means of contrasts in experiences”, states Jaarsma.

Her work parallels garment and architectural constructions- what she calls: ‘flexible housings’. By placing bodies in tense situations, she recreates this sense of re-orientation she experiences as an “insider/outsider” in her new country. Her works are designed to: “interrogate methods of reassurance through religious façade and rituals”, “activate questions around the need for protection in a fragile world”, and “reconfigure cultural idioms”.

Through restraining the wearer from totally free movement, the garment-like sculptural constructs and the performances around their display question the relationship of bodies in relationship to community and crowdedness. She explores our need/burden exchange with objects and shelters by directly harnessing the body to its edifices. The performers become refugees in place.

“This Land is Ours” is one such project. Jaarsma printed digital photographs of earthquake rubble on cloth and constructed lean-to like tent costumes. “The shelters are actually satirical comments about the ironic relationship among NGOs and the communities they are trying to ‘save’”, says Jaarsma.”Different NGOs, divided by region, country, and vision would place a flag, fence their field and lay claim over the recovery area projects.” Jaarsma saw her work as symbolically sheltering the people from the claim of the NGO ‘rescuers’ who had become occupiers and colonists.

[kilpatrih]

The Yams Collective, the largest of the eight collectives participating in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, has withdrawn over objections to the curatorial program. The group, known in the Biennial as HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? (tongue in cheek, because “African” is not a language) Is 38 black and mostly queer artists. They withdrew on objections to the Biennial’s inclusion of Joe Scanlan’s “Donelle Woolford” piece, in which the white male Princeton professor hires black female actors to play the part of a fictional black artist named Donelle Woolford.

The group issued a statement: “We felt that the representation of an established academic white man posing as a privileged African-American woman is problematic, even if he tries to hide it in an avatar’s mystique. It kind of negates our presence there, our collaborative identity as representing the African diaspora.” (hyperallergic.com)

The Whitney Biennial’s response has been tantamount to: “Yeah, we want controversy. Why else would we include both these things in the same room?” One only has to look to the work of Adrian Piper or Kara Walker to note the precedent racially charged works on display at the Whitney. Racial controversy is certainly not a historically avoided topic. The Whitney has tried to rise above criticism under the guise of “creating dialogue” around racial issues. But, is that a fair argument?

Perhaps racially-charged conversations are overshadowing a wider conversation about when a curator chooses to opposing works representing vastly different frames of reference and shows them side-by-side. Is it to create controversy or a tactic of “covering all our bases”? Is it fair for a curator to essentially overwrite the content of both pieces to make vehicles for the goal of an institutional statement? Is the power of any statement about identity politics in the hands of a curator subject to change by its placement alongside other artworks? 

[kilpatrih]

“In his latest project, philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats is taking the long and DIY view of surveillance.Keats has organized, in associated with team titanic gallery in Berlin, “CenturyCamera,” for which the group has constructed 100 cameras meant to take exposures that last 100 years. The participant will reveal the location to a child, who in turn will be responsible for keeping the secret into adulthood, so that 100 years from now one person in the world will know where to retrieve each camera.” 

“I think that these cameras perhaps have the potential to make people more attentive to change, and their part in it, by shifting perception from the immediate to longer than a human lifespan,” the artist wrote to Hyperallergic. “It’s as if you were seeing yourself vicariously through the eyes of future generations, and judging your environment accordingly. With these cameras, time is both stretched and compressed.” (hyperallergic.com)

This project raises and important question around the archived nature of our globalized/digitized existence. With the announcement this week in Wall Street Journal that an EU court has ruled that Google must remove an individual's online data if they are petitioned to do so, this topic is particularly poignant at this moment in time. The EU court cited "an individual's right to be forgotten"- signalling a huge shift in the dialogue around historical nature of archives.

While Keats' project relies on voluntary participation by informed individuals, it will still hinge on creating surveillance pictures made by hidden cameras, and thus has the potential to invade the privacy of others- documenting images that will only be revealed after 100 years. Theoretically, Keat's project is a lower-tech breach of the "right to be forgotten".

It magnifies the sort of lack of control of examination and judgement by future generations that has always existed. One only need thumb through back issues of TIME or National Geographic Magazines to understand the indelible (and often coercive) nature of archived images. It raises questions about the domains of historical societies, family albums, and museum documentation. 

Has the advent of the selfie and social media led to the idea that we have a right to and must control all photographic documentation of ourselves? What does that mean to the nature of the archive of information if each individual gets first right of refusal over what image gets recorded for posterity?

[kilpatrih]

Bucharest Biennial

Founded 2005

Bucharest, Romania

“promotes awareness and dissemination of culture, particularly in the fields of the a by means of exchanges and cultural cooperation within Europe and beyond and is looking for strategies that would develop mutual understanding and offer insights from different perspectives.”

Held in various venues and public spaces around the city of Buchrest, including: several communist-era abandoned factories, a nightclub, The Institute for Political Research at University of Bucharest, a national museum, the House of Free Press, the Pavilion Center for Contemporary Arts and Culture, Cinemas, restaurants, independent artist-run community studio spaces,  and “in the public spaces aiming to transform the city itself into an ongoing workshop-cum-field of action”. Participants are mostly European artists, many of whom are Romanian. 

[kilpatrih]

Land Art Mongolia

Founded 2009

Mongolia (Baga Gazrin Chuluu, Gobi, Gazrin Chuluu, Dundgobi)

  “The Biennial takes place every two years at different regions of Mongolia which represents not only the high variety of landscapes, also respects the nomadic tradition of Mongolia. Focuses on Land Art as one possible form of spatial and outdoor visualization of the relations between nature, culture, and social practices. Through a collaborative land-art exhibition series intended to reoccur every two years at different places and different regions of Mongolia. This is not only due to the highly diverse landscapes; it also respects the nomadic tradition of Mongolia. The artworks will remain permanently in situ, and therefore consistently create permanent exhibits throughout the country.” Land Art Mongolia draws international artists, about half of whom are from Asian or Russian neighboring countries, and one quarter are Mongolian.

   Art and Politics 2012 Curators: Fumio Nanjo, Rasha Ragab, and Anja Brietzke

 “Artists are invited to provide drafts and work plans reflecting on smart growth, public policy and development practices as well as conventions in architecture and landscape design, a new kind of art space arises: a virtual, discontinuous, shape-shifting terrain, more conceptual than architectural, with a scope that has already become global.”

The theme of the 2012 series shows anti-industrial environmental concerns, geo-political concerns , and concern for the preservation of nomadic cultural heritage and interdependency with the surroundings that is the history of human life in Mongolia.

[kilpatrih]

“When artists Mohamed Ali Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner first heard mentions of Norway's historic "human zoo" they were surprised, sure. But what Fadlabi (from Sudan) and Cuzner (Canadian-Swedish) found even more astonishing, was how thoroughly that moment in time had been erased from their adoptive country's collective memory. So they decided to bring the dusty photo album back to life by recreating the village, in the same Oslo city park, from May 15 to August 31, 2014.” (npr.org)

Norway has a long-standing reputation as a tolerant and humane society that embraces a large immigrant population. After all, it is the homeland of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But, artists Cuzner and Fadlabi are critical of this image, saying: “this is a country that enjoys basking in the ‘image of Norwegian goodness’ a kind of ‘aren't we grand for being more equal than everyone else’ attitude that is perhaps unique to the welfare states of Scandinavia. It's a sentiment widely on display this year as Norway celebrates the bicentennial of its constitution.”

So, to remind Norwegians of their past atrocities, Cuzner and Fadlabi plan to reenact the “Congo Village”a spectacle of exoticism in a predominate Norwegian public park. The project proposal has been greeted with public outcry.

 Rune Berglund Steen with the Norwegian Centre Against Racism call the project “degrading” and raises concerns that it could open the door to the harassment on African immigrants living in Norway. He raises concerns that the project could fall short of the artists’ intent and fears "2014 won't stand as resounding answer to 1914, but as a very confusing echo."

Fadlabi, an African immigrant himself, says Steen’s brand of concern “ is a perfect illustration of a fundamentally patronizing attitude that makes the project so relevant.”   Fadlabi and Cuzner see themselves as “forcing their adoptive country to tackle its complicated racial history”.  

Work of this nature has a precedent in Norway.  SAIH - The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund  distributed “Radi-Aid” a video parody of charity shows Africans collecting money to purchase radiators to send to Norway and even earnestly singing a theme song about how people are “freezing to death”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJLqyuxm96k The “Radi-Aid” website asks the question, “Imagine if every person in Africa saw the “Africa for Norway”-video, and this was the only information they ever got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?” (africafornorway.no)

Fadlabi and Cuzner intend to employs “extras” to reenact the “Congo Village”. Many Norwegians have expressed that they hope not all the extras employed will be African.  The artists have countered: "Why don't you trust Africans to make up their mind and be part of this exhibition?... It's this superiority, this guardianship, it's just so terrible."

This project puts me in mind of Santiago Sierra’s “Line Tattooed on People” series where he paid participants to be human canvases and have a line tattooed across their backs in exchange for a payment commiserate to a day’s work.  One such work by Sierra employed prostitutes. “Four prostitutes addicted to heroin were hired for the price of a shot of heroin to give their consent to be tattooed. Normally they charge 2,000 or 3,000 pesetas, between 15 and 17 dollars, for fellatio, while the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about 67 dollars.”(pictured above) His project seemed to drive home the many (possibly degrading and unhealthful) things we are totally blind to people doing for money by displaying one (many might say “less evil”) thing that people were willing to do for money as a spectacle. “By turning the process of exploitation into a spectacle, viewed in a gallery or museum, Sierra causes the institution to collaborate in relations of power and economics, thus highlighting the ubiquity and inevitability of such relations and raising a number of related ethical questions.”(tate.org.uk)

[theculturetrip]

10 Stunning Museums in the Maghreb You Should Visit

Explore ten of the most important, dynamic museums and art galleries in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, with our culture lover’s guide to North Africa. Read more at theculturetrip »

[kilpatrih]

http://www.lugaradudas.org/

lugar a dudas (Room for doubts)

Cali, Colombia

Founded 2005

Mission: Lugar a dudas is an independent, not-for-profit space, which aims to promote and disseminate  contemporary artistic creation through research, exhibition, production and open confrontations. Lugar a dudas “aims at facilitating experimentation and innovation in contemporary arts practice by stimulating dialogues between artists and across cultures.” At the core of its activities lies “the understanding of art as a fundamental and dynamic agent in the shaping and transformation of society.”

Programming/Community Resources:

 Lugar a dudas promotes itself as “a laboratory to foment knowledge of contemporary art, facilitate development of creative process, and provoke community to interact through artistic practices.” 

Lugar a dudas hosts two exhibition spaces: one in a street-level shop display window, the other an on-site permanent exhibition room with rotating temporary exhibitions inside its building.

The Documentation Center is a resource library that specializes in “visual arts and film including a collection of over 3000 books, magazines, independent publications and videos. The center is also serving as a space for talks, seminars and debates about artistic practice.”

Lugar a dudas hosts an international artist residency open to artists and curators “to develop projects in response to their new environment” by “starting dialogues with artists, organizations, students and arts professionals in Cali, establishing a mutual exchange of ideas.”

Lugar a dudas also produces free booklets with complete information on the activities the space produces both in print and available for download online.

lugar a dudas reminds me of Commendante Marcos' Zapatiatas and their use of digital culture to raise the profile of their organization. Through fame, they insulate themselves against the dangers of being vocally resistant to the political climate of their home country. Lugar a dudas is literally creating space for "doubts" to be expressed, but by doing so in a way that is acknowledged and supported by the international arts community/marketplace they add a layer of protection to host events and exhibitions that speak out about government corruption, poverty, power dynamics, and other socio-political concerns in Colombia. 

[kilpatrih]

Raw Material Company (A Center for Art, Knowledge, and Society)

Dakar, Senegal

Founded 2008  

Mission:  

Raw Material Company is an art initiative “unfolding within the realms of exhibition making, commissioning, knowledge sharing, and archiving of theory and criticism. It works to foster appreciation and growth of African artistic and intellectual creativity. The underlying rationale is the firm belief in visual arts as a potent tool capable of shifting views, and ignite engagement for art practice as a viable path for social and political transformation.” 

Programming/Community Resources: 

As a resource center, Raw Material Company offers artist talks, portfolio review sessions, master-classes, symposia, lectures, panel and round table discussions and research presentations.

Raw Materials Company hosts an onsite library/archive focused on “contemporary art with an emphasis on African and Africa related practices.”

Raw Materials company hosts contemporary group and solo shows in the “Raw Gallery”, a 100sqm space on site. They also host off-site collaborative exhibitions with “partner institutions such as the National Gallery and Musée Théodore Monod (IFAN)”. According to their website, “The exhibition program also aims to develop curatorial activity as a field of work in the African context.”

Raw Materials Company hosts a residency for national and international artists “directed towards artists, architects, academics, curators and critical writers” and is focused on “community engagement as a mean to reintegrate art practice as a defining part of society.” As such, it “makes special efforts at creating a dialogue between the public space as a stage of artistic interventions and its users.” Raw materials Company declares the purpose of its residency “to sustain a continuous presentation of and a confrontation with African and Africa related artistic practices.”

Raw Material Company also operates a roof-top alfresco restaurant and bar La Compagnie whose aim is to “become a sensual and visual extension of the overall philosophy of sharing and educating that underlies the concept of the institution” and seeks to act “as an informal space for meeting and exchange”.

RMC is a great example of the ways that globalization and access to a world audience and information has changed the power dynamic for small grass-roots art institutions. By accessing an international contemporary artists and information, a small non-profit arts organization can tap into global funding possibilities and create cross-cultural exchanges. Just the ability to have a web presence and control it's own image can be a powerful tool to a small arts institution. It can truly become a hub for the exchange of world-wide ideas.

[kilpatrih]

Makeshift Magazine (print and online) http://mkshft.org/blog/

Makeshift really reflects a global society of "makers" that includes: artists, scientists, inventors, builders, mechanics, architects, and entrepreneurs. If "necessity is the mother of invention", Makeshift does it's best to highlight the many faces of necessity at various levels from all over the globe. It showcases what Okui Enwezor called "South-South" dialogue and focuses on "invention and making within environments of constraint". Makeshift reflects a growing concern within contemporary art practices that include social engagement and design. Shelters, transportation, accessible technology, health and science hacking are all part of this dialogue. This magazine is an immense resource catalog of projects by scrappy makers embodying global DIY culture. 

 "These are environments where resources may be scarce, but where ingenuity is used incessantly for survival, enterprise, and a self-expression. Makeshift is about people, the things they make, and the context they make them in. We want to place you, our readers, in locations you will likely never get to see and reveal street-level ingenuity you might not expect. We want to show the minutiae of how massive areas function, thrive, and simply survive. We want to reveal the complex inner workings below surface understanding." (kickstarter/mkshft.org)

[kilpatrih]

“…the outward face of globalization installed an ideology of corporate internationalism whose cumulative effect was to sublate the discourse of multiculturalism.” –Kobena Mercer

I propose the advertisements of the Italian fashion manufacturer Benetton as an illustration of some of the timeline context of the recent reading by Kobena Mercer.

In the 1980s, photographer Olivero Toscani created for Benetton, an Italian fashion company, a series of multiracial campaigns with the "United Colors of Benetton" slogan. At a time when the Cosby Show was considered “ground breaking” for depicting a affluent and educated family of color, Benneton’s multiracial campaigns were the equivalent of saying “aren’t we so cutting edge for showing Black, Caucasian, Hispanic, and Asian models all wearing our brightly colored sweaters frolicking together?”.  Void of content that went beyond the “We are the World”-ness of having models from various ethnicities all posed together in a single image, these earlier ads capitalized on a climate that artist Coco Fusco called “the Other is in”.

The token “rainbow of people” overtures toward social change have long since been decoded as failures at attempts for social change and have even been cast as exploitive for their consumerist motivations capitalizing on faces of color. So,Benetton is currently aggressively attempting to revamp its image  with a new advertising campaign, “Unemployee of the Year,” which highlights the world’s millions of unemployed youth, and  “The Kiss,” which shows world leaders smooching and has an online component #UNHATE which allows users to communicate with one another and the company.

This also reflects a demand of globalization- the shift in depictions reflecting degrees of global awareness from spectacle of the nameless Other to culture-barrier-defiant shared human experiences. For instance, “The Kiss” ads need very little translation- US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao locking lips may be essential Western in nature, but translate easily globally, especially in an atmosphere of online appropriation.

[kilpatrih]

Cecilia Azcarate has a tumblr blog B4XVI  which bears the tagline: "Highlighting an invisible conversation between hip hop and art before the 16th century"

Pictorially striking, Azcarate indiscriminately mines the cultural artifacts of cultures to compare to promotional photography of pop stars. Her juxtaposed works become full of content about the cultural status of pop stars in the context of the status of those whose likeness was captured in historical art. Royalty, heroes, deities, and mythical figures are set in direct comparison with the famous musicians.This work could be seen as flippant appropriation to create punchlines, but I see these as having the potential for intelligent discourse about cultural semiotics and social structure. 

"In an unlikely marriage, it pairs pictures of rappers with historical sculptures, paintings, and statues from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, tracing the swag and power poses of hip-hop artists like Young Thug and Whiz Khalifa to pre-Colombian effigies and Netherlandish paintings. It now seems clear: one century’s highbrow is another’s lowbrow. Azcarate’s side-by-side images give us a reason to ditch the labels altogether." (http://hyperallergic.com/120555/hip-hop-meets-art-history/)

[kilpatrih]

"The history of the world, according to Eduardo Sarabia's dastardly work, is a tale of sex, drugs and violence, told in the language of commerce." 

Each work is unique, crafted according to traditional Mexican techniques, and painted in light blue enamel evocative of chintzy China. But among so many soft, domestic signifiers, Sarabia has also inserted his typical rougher-edged iconography. If the plate rims contain the smattering of floral and geometric motifs typical of tableware, at their center are representations of guns, marijuana leaves, liquor bottles, and naked women, as well as farm animals like roosters and goats. Add these images together, and you have a portrait of a culture dominated by black-market forces and rural poverty, the sort of world that we in the wealthy West too often ignore as we sit to eat at our well-set tables or go about the other daily rituals that constitute our privileged lives.  (http://www.blouinartinfo.com/)

Employing traditional ceramics, Ming Dynasty and Blue Delft ceramics colors and motifs, and the idea of "collection" through non-utilitarian display of utilitarian objects, Sarabia builds a mutli-cultural network of meaning in his work that evokes the earliest  "Silk Road" trade route's complexity and interests. He updates this theme with ideas of drugs and the sex trade as the new cross-cultural commerce language. He embeds an easily recognizable pictoral language of Orientalism to address modern commercial woes.