Entrails: Latin American Artist Talks
Thursday April 20, 5-7pm @ WWG
Join us for this rare opportunity (here on Nipissing territory, anyways) to hear 5 artists from Latin America speaking about their practices! Come make new art friends, and bounce ideas around with us.
Ruth Vigueras Bravo (Mexico)
Nicolás Spinosa (Argentina/Spain)
Cecilia Stelini (Brazil)
Oscar Gavilán Ortiz (Chile)
Neryth Manrique (Colombia)
See short artist statements below for more details.
See Facebook event here
Entrails: Performances
Friday April 21st
5pm – starting at WKP Kennedy Gallery
6-8pm – WWG
Kicking off the festival at the WKP Kennedy Gallery at 5pm, Alejandro Arauz with the Near North Voices, will present “Choir Chant” – which explores lineage, Diaspora and identity through 8-12 choral singers performing the Canadian national anthem in their diverse native languages (including Ojibway, Cree, Armenian, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese). This piece will also include video art and sculptural elements, responding to Rebecca Belmore’s “Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother”.
From there we will migrate to the White Water Gallery around 6pm, for a series of performances by five artists visiting from Latin America – Ruth Vigueras Bravo (Mexico), Nicolás Spinosa (Argentina/Spain), Cecilia Stelini (Brazil), Oscar Gavilán Ortiz (Chile), Neryth Manrique (Colombia) – along the theme of Entrails.
The Latin interanea, or “internal,” is the root of the word entrails (víscera or entraña, in Spanish), which could either refer to a main organ situated inside the body or generally as something internal. For instances, the noun entrails is also used to mean the inside of something such as the entrails of a street or the vital components of a system. We could refer to this word in both a spiritual or physical way–referencing the body or the material world in which we live. In either instances, the word is often used when the internal is made visible, marking the visceral and often uncomfortable, perhaps even fatal, moment of exposure either literally or symbolically. Thus exposure and concealment, internal and external, conscious and unconscious are important aspects of this word to consider. In thinking about the body specifically, it’s possible to also deliberate the ways that the body’s entrails record or respond to both physical and mental triggers, often manifesting inner thoughts and feelings.
Ruth Vigueras Bravo (Mexico)
Bravo’s research explores her own human body as interlocutor by interacting with the viewer in the gallery or public space and from which she collects objects, flavours and smells to transform them into symbolic objects. Over four years of personal Hormonal disorders inspire Vigueras to make her performance work a catharsis of her own reality.
Nicolás Spinosa (Argentina/Spain)
Spinosa’s work explores and reflects on the mechanisms of interchange and appropriation of symbolic capital, highlighting the process of production, distribution, commercialization, and consumption of what the market calls “Contemporary Art”. As a visual performance artist his own body becomes the subject of this market.
Cecilia Stelini (Brazil)
Stelini explores the dual meaning of sacred and profane symbology present on the heart and the fish and what happens when this two elements are assemble together in an almost surgical procedure conducted by the artist. Stelini, herself has been subject of a life-threatening open heart surgery. Video clips from her own surgery create the ambience for Stelini’s performance.
Oscar Gavilán Ortiz (Chile)
Gavilán’s research and performance work makes political statements about the mutilated and displaced human bodies that are consequences of the coal mining industry and the mining patrimony in the south of Chile. Vivid representations of this theme are created by making nonfunctional prothesis using industrial and natural objects.
Neryth Manrique (Colombia)
By incorporating everyday objects in her performance work, Manrique explores the subjects of memory and violence present in the Colombian contemporary sociopolitical environment. She performs in the gallery as well as on the urban space inviting the spectators and/or pedestrians to meditate on the on going struggles of her national reality.
See Facebook event here
Presented by The Contemporary Art Committee and the Museum of Northern History from Kirkland Lake, as part of their annual exhibition, in partnership with the WKP Kennedy Gallery. Artist talks supported by Fine Arts & Performing Arts, Nipissing University.
Thanks also to Mitchell Ellam for visualizing guts for the header & poster!
