Current & Past Events
Xisra: A Photographic Archive of Recent Art Practices in Colombia
Presented by colourschool and the Or Gallery For the last two decades, public funding of the arts in Colombia has been almost exclusively channeled into a series of national and regional art salons that take place every two years and are based on open-calls in which all artists are invited to submit their work to a jury who then curates each salon and awards two grand prizes. Between October and January 2006, Tomas Giraldo was commissioned by the Cultural Ministry in Colombia to photographically document a series of fourteen exhibitions distributed among the country’s seven major regions. His main task was to create and manage an archive of over 400 artists destined for two publications: an art catalogue and a website. In an independent initiative that seeks to draw attention to the digital character of the archive and its subsequent portability, Giraldo will present this archive as a series of slide shows, in part in reaction to the limited possibilities of dissemination and contextualization offered by the coffee table book format or by an online archive that offers no real opportunity for dialogue or interaction with the public. Using the simple format of the show of ?slides? or images, Giraldo seeks to make reference to pedagogical systems in order to propose a more critical manner of utilizing documentary information—in this case by extracting that information from the institutional structure responsible for its production. This ‘soft academicism’ insists that the everyday keeper or handler of material (aka the archivist) is often the most appropriate individual to manage or represent a body of knowledge. This archive will be utilized to discuss recent art practices in the conflicted socio-political context of Colombia and how these practices are represented and managed by precarious institutions governed by ambiguous and often contradictory sets of cultural policies.
- host:
- Tomas Giraldo Feener
- date & time:
- November 2nd, 2006 at 6 pm
- location:
- 6363 Stores Road Studio 2A University of British Columbia
- contact:
- [info@colourschool.org]