CONVERSAS
2007
60 Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre | General Curator: Gabriel Perez Barreiro | Exhibition Conversas (Conversations)
Curator: Alejandro Cesarco
All my dreams have come true, video, Annika Ström, Suecia, 2004; Enclosures, video, Nesrine Khodr, Líbano, 2004; The Settler’s Bride, painting, Lux Lindner, Argentina, 2005; A giant curve turns straight, video, Leticia El Halli Obeid, Argentina, 2006.
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.
