Leticia Obeid

¿POR QUÉ ME PERSIGUEN LOS ARCHIVOS?

2020

Why do archives haunt me?
Sound installation, 19:43 minutes, November 2020

Curated for the exhibition The Collection listens, Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires.

This piece researches the works on the collection of a traditional prize in Argentina, the National Salon, which has existed since 1911. The audio was installed in the deposit of sculptural works that have remained in the possession of Palais de Glace since the 1930s. Going through the catalogs of the awards, the audio makes a journey that threads some points in relation to the problem of selecting, filing, remembering and also what is left out of that selection that builds up a collection.

Palais de Glace

ARTIST´S FILM INTERNATIONAL

2020

Organized by: Whitechapel Gallery, London – Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires
May – September

Artists’ Film International is a collaborative project featuring film, video and animation from around the world.

Life can feel like the accumulation of words in a book as we record thoughts and experiences. What if we could reverse, pause or accelerate these in the same way that a book’s pages can be flipped back and forth? Janus was a two-faced god in Roman mythology: one face looking to the past and the other to the future. Janus was the god of doorways, beginnings and endings. In this series, the books’ pages behave like Janus, going from past to future of a text or vice versa. Jano is the attempt to revise the minimum portion of time that can be frozen in movement, through image.

PROA

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY

NOTAS Y HUELLAS

2019

Notes and traces
Gallery 1313, Toronto | 10 to 20 of October.

Curator: Laura Preger

1313 Queen St. West, Toronto

Presented by Colectivo Toronto and Club Cultural Matienzo

With the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Metropolitan Fund for Culture, Arts and Sciences of the City of Buenos Aires

Text by Laura Preger

FANTASMA

2017

SOLO SHOW | Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA) | August – October

Curator: Teresa Riccardi

Ghost
This exhibition was named after the main video of the exhibition, a piece that superimposes two layers of the same film, The Philadelphia story, by George Cukor (1940) in its original version in English and in its version dubbed into Spanish. A slight offset between the two generates a kind of ghost in the image, residue and point of intersection at the same time. In this sample, the video was installed in the space by sectorizing the areas of each language, so the film could be watched in English or Spanish according to the location in the room. A second video, Jano & Marcel, revisits Duchamp’s work, Étant Donnés (1946-1966). The other axis of the exhibition was the series of photos El canto de Jano, which establishes dialogues and connections between texts and authors, genres and times.

OASIS, DIXIT, ARTEBA

2016

Section Dixit | ArteBA 2016 | La Rural, Argentina.

Known and unsuspected affinities in a journey through the artistic production of our time

Curators: Federico Beza, Lara Marmor, Sebastián Vidal Mackinson

Drawings from the Diamante series (2011).

Ink and pencil on paper, variable measures.

C-31: LO CONTRARIO DE LA MAGIA

2014

MALBA | March – July.

Curator: Lux Lindner

Work: The letter of B, 2012. Ink on paper

31: The opposite of magic
The exhibition proposes an approach to the recent production of artists whose work processes are far from the ease and promises of immediacy of magic, and are more linked to the patience and decomposition of the scientific method. The approaches are as varied as the artistic journey of each one, although a predominance of drawing has been sought.

“Unlike other artists in this exhibition, Leticia Obeid, a person to whom all expressive spontaneity is extraordinarily suspicious, is oriented towards soft, sociological science. It was not always like that. When she gathered stones offered by the Pampa Gringa, which were not Many, I wanted to be a geologist, and this perhaps led to a geology of sociology. (Geology was also the preferred science of Lévi-Strauss, another ousted by Reynoso… who is left without a tuco stain at this point?). For the purposes of our sample, the result is drawings that Obeid makes with a cold and heartless strategy: to copy the handwriting of the copy theorist, Walter Benjamin “.

“There is a word, once widely used to deal with bearded sages, that often comes to mind when it comes to Obeid, and it is acrimonious, the pursuit of extreme precision, without sparing the burden if necessary. His exposure device It makes one think more of the naturalist’s cabinet than of the supplier of eye candy to galleries. “

Lux lindner

DOBLES (MX)

2014

MUAC | (University Museum of Contemporary Art) UNAM | Mexico | May – August.

Curator: Alejandra Labastida

“Dobles is an investigation that explores the political and economic history of dubbing in Mexico. Obeid problematizes the split between body and voice that characterizes this profession. The economic capital of voice actors is the ability to shed their voice, transform it and lend it to another body. But by not having a visible and recognizable body in the middle, they are easily replaceable and disposable. These interviews reveal the potentialities and risks of this condition, from its labor injustices to the ingenuity with which the actors of the Mexican golden age mocked the censorship system that prevails over the media.”

Curatorial text.

Catalogue

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

2013

Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam  | April – June

Curator: Madelon van Schie 

“In Dictados (2009) Leticia El Halli Obeid travels by train from the centre of Buenos Aires to a suburban district while copying the Carta de Jamaica by the nineteenth century liberator Simón Bolívar by hand. Among the visions Bolivar unfolds in this idealistic 1815 discourse is his prospect for a united and free America, and he calls upon Europe to sup- port Latin Americans in their struggle for independence. Particularly after leaving the centre of Buenos Aires, as El Halli Obeid goes farther into divulging the content of Carta de Jamaica while passing through different urban areas, the more a certain tart image of inequality begins to force it- self onto the viewer. One is almost automatically compelled to begin comparing Bolivar’s political and social ideals
with the present state of affairs in Argentina or, mutatis mutandis, all of Latin America. Two centuries after Bolivar’s call to action, the concept of freedom still appears to be utopian.

Subsequently Dictados unerringly zeros in on the problem of translating the highest ideals, such as those expounded by Bolívar, into practice. As becomes clear in one of the quotes seen from the letter; “It is more difficult, says Montesquieu, to free a nation from slavery than to enslave a free nation.”

Madelon Van Schie, curator.

Catalogue

THE LIFE OF OTHERS

Repetition and Survival

2013

Akbank Sanat, Estambul | February – April.

Curator: Alejandra Labastida

“Deleuze states that unlike resemblance, repetition is an act that arises in relation only to that which has no equal or equivalent and therefore concerns non-exchangeable and non-replaceable singularities. It is essentially a force that opposes the singular–as a transgression or exception–to the particular capable of being subsumed by laws. This project aims to postulate that the proliferation of artistic practices generated around appropriation and citation strategies—the translation and recreation of historical pieces or events—responds to this force that affirms the political status of the singularity—of the non-replaceable being—versus the domesticated paradigm of the equivalent and interchangeable.
Most exhibitions that explore this tendency focus on the decision that the artist makes from the present in order to rescue specific events and works. This project proposes to extend the question in order to consider not only the recreative will of the artist but also this singular power that wills itself. Walter Benjamin refers to “translatability” as an inherent demand of the original and therefore as the supreme proof of the life of the works of art. The relation between a translation and the original is literally vital: the former emerges as the result of an act of survival of the latter. It is, of course, not just a simple relation of equality and similarity but rather a process of renovation and evolution that unchains the conditions of possibility for a critical reformulation..”

Alejandra Labastida, curatorial text, fragment.

DOBLES

2013

ArteBA | La Rural, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

Curator: Lara Marmor 

Doubles
DOBLES was the winning project of the Young Curators Program organized by arteBA and sponsored by Banco Ciudad of Buenos Aires. DOBLES was presented at the 22nd edition of arteBA Fair, between May 24th and 27th, 2013, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Catalogue

54. BIENAL DE VENECIA

2011

54. Venice Biennale, Between always and never, Arsenale, Venice.

Curators: Alfons Hug y Paz Aburto Guevara

Conceived as a continuation of the exhibition Less time than place, this exhibition summons an artist from each country of each Hispanic-American nation, replicating in a certain way the traditional structure of national participations at the Venice Biennale. The common thread of these works is the reflection on the meaning of independence, autonomy and questions about national identities.

For this show Dictados became bilingual, as was originally Bolívar’s text, written in Spanish to be translated and published in English.

Dictations

MENOS TIEMPO QUE LUGAR

2010-2011

Curators: Alfons Hug y Paz Aburto Guevara

Less time than place
This exhibition was commanded by the Goethe Institute to commemorate the bicentennial of the independence of Spain, which the American nations were successively celebrating as of 2009. Taking as a starting point The Letter from Jamaica, a text by Simón Bolívar, each artist made a piece by revising those words that were written in 1815 as a call to build a politically united continent and contrasting them with various local realities, stories, myths and problems.

CONVERSAS

2007

6⁰ Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre | General Curator: Gabriel Perez Barreiro | Exhibition Conversas (Conversations)

Curator: Alejandro Cesarco 

In this exhibition, the curator invited a group of artists who in turn had to invite two artists each, thereby generating a structure of collaborations and crossings between works, themes and places.

“Gabriel Perez Barreiro: Within a general line that ‘the personal is political’ I would like you to talk a little about the core of Leticia El Halli Obeid, where this seems to be raised more explicitly.

Alejandro Cesarco: We invited Leticia to participate with a work entitled A curve so giant that it seems straight, a video that refers to a harvesting machine factory that existed in a town in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. In the 90s and as a consequence of the imposition of neoliberal policies, this factory was sold and then ‘restructured’ by several multinational companies until they decided that it was no longer productive to keep it open. The factory in question had been founded and worked by Leticia’s family since the 1950s. Leticia invites Lux Lindner with a work that refers to the history of Argentine art and politics and Nesrine Khodr with a video that makes that idea explicit of how borders generally allow one-way traffic. We responded to this group with a video by Annike Ström that in this context works, as you said, bringing the political to a personal scale and vice versa. It is a very short video where the artist’s grandparents, who are Swedish, try to translate this phrase from Swedish into English.”

Excerpt from the catalog, p. 160.

UNA CURVA TAN GIGANTE QUE PARECE RECTA

2006

Premio Petrobrás | ArteBa, Buenos Aires 2006.

Project selected and produced for the Petrobrás-ArteBa Prize, Buenos Aires 2006.

A curve so giant it seems straight
The work consisted of a video and a publication that reconstructed the history of the Araus combine harvester factory, which existed in the town of Noetinger, province of Córdoba since the late 1940s, and which went through all the typical economic vicissitudes in Argentine industry until its sale, in the 90’s, to a multinational company. The video mixes material filmed during a soybean harvest in the Pampas plains in 2006, with Super 8 footage from the factory’s archive.

The art fair takes place in one of the pavilions of Rural Fair of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, a fact that gave rise to the idea of ​​working with this topic in the first place. In a way, the work investigated those connections between space, history, the economy and, in particular, the effect of globalization on our perception of scale: the big, the small, according to the point of view and the position in space.

Catalogue

DIBUJOS

2003

SOLO SHOW | Cepia Visual Arts Space, UNC, Córdoba | June – July.

Curator: Carina Cagnolo

Drawings
The decision of naming this exhibition as “Drawings” had to do with pointing out all those places and practices touched by drawing, even though it was other means and supports than paper and graphic tools. The set brought together works from several years and already showed a strong interest in thinking about the relationships between image and word that would be in all the following production.

PISO 6

2002

Floor 6
Video Studios | Group exhibition at the Faculty of Architecture of the National University ofCórdoba | September 18, 19 and 20

Organized by Gustavo Crembil

Video

Photocopy

LETICIA EL HALLI OBEID

2001

SOLO SHOW | Juana de Arco, Buenos Aires, Argentina | August – September.

Catalogue

23 CUADRAS

2001

Casa 13 and Galería Cinerama | Córdoba.

Curator: Carina Cagnolo.

23 blocks was an exhibition that took place in two simultaneous places: in Casa 13 * and in a commercial premises of the Cinerama Passage, in the center of the City of Córdoba, twelve and a half blocks away between them. A set of objects made with the remains of fabric discarded by a sewing workshop, as they came off the cutting table, with minimal interventions, constituted the subject of this experiment on the characteristics of the merchandise and its relationship to the context. At one pole of the experience was the space of art, delimited as such; in the other, the open, indeterminate urban space. The Cinerama passage, named after the homonymous cinema that used to have a 3,600 screen at its Golden time, was a meeting place of social and commercial life between the 60s and 80s. With the creation of the first mall in the city began the process of decay of these typical galleries of the cordovan center that slowly turned into residual spaces in the city, image of the progress of another era.

* At Casa 13 the show was the final work of Laura del Barco and Leticia El Halli Obeid at the School of Arts of the National University of Córdoba, in July 2001.

MÚSICA

1999

Casa 13 | Córdoba, Argentina | October – November.

Curator: José Pizarro

Music is a series of works that attempts to explore the tension between inventory and memory. In it, the lists seem to give an objective framework to the experience of hearing, remembering and repeating the texts and sounds learned as part of a collective sentimental education. The lyrics of beloved songs are replaced by symbols, little boxes, which try to capture the unspeakable. The color red, which connotes the emotional, the loving, the blood, is used here in a mildly ironic sense to standardize an emotionality that contrasts with the coldness of the inventory. Drawings, objects, home photos that rescue some adolescent scenes, songs recorded in karaoke, make up this kind of fragmentary and nostalgic self-portrait.

The exhibition was installed at Casa 13, Córdoba, between October 29 and November 12, 1999, curated by José Pizarro.

Catalogue