P74 KINO: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
4 March 2016 – 20 March 2016
P74 Gallery, Trg Prekomorskih brigad 1, Ljubljana
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition P74 KINO: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz on Friday, 4 March 2016 at 19.00 at the P74 Gallery in Ljubljana.
In the program cycle P74 KINO we present the exceptional video works and films of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico). In 1997 she finished her studies at the Department of Film and Video at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the last decade and a half she has been active as a visual artist, lecturer and author of texts in her birthplace of Puerto Rico, known for its long colonial history. The works of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz are created on the blurred border between ethnography, fiction, documentary film, the local, symbolic and material history as well as the current situation. They offer an alternative representation of the Carribbean environment, its politics and identities. In doing so, they borrow the strategies of performance, film and anthropology, orientating themselves towards the native cosmologies and raising philosophical questions about nature and existence, the complex social history and the post-colonial situation.
After a long period of research, observation and documentation in which the camera is constantly present as an object, the author records different communities and cities in order to create a bricolage: about the alternative history of a popular Haitian market, about a toxic tropical plant or about the newly discovered archaeological site in Puerto Rico. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz works with amateur actors to research the economic, ecological and political challenges of the local environment. Many times she encourages them to use strategies of re-enactment and performance art. The camera, maintaining the sensibility of a documentary, slides slowly through details, parts of faces, light, sound, fragments.
Her most recent experimental film Verano de Mujeres / Summer of Women (2015) is a type of feminist ethnofiction, a vision of the future, which she has built from the lives of extraordinary women: farmers, painters, musicians, teachers. Just as in the majority of her works it also contains a non-narrative layer, the speculative imaginary – a type of ethnography of what is possible, of community, of the collective.
The works of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz have been show on a number of solo and group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, Wattis Institute/CCA and Gallery Kurimanzutto in Mexico City, among others. She has participated in a number of residencies, including Gasworks, London; Apexart, New York City; Wattis Institute/CCA, San Francisco; and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Visual Arts Award for 2015. The Pérez Art Museum in Miami just opened the first larger solo presentation of her work in February 2016, and in April 2016, she will take part in an artist residency and presentation of her work at the New Museum in New York City.
Post-Military Cinema (2014), 10:53 min
The video Post-Military Cinema was filmed in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, one of the poorest parts of the island, in a movie theater that was once the Roosevelt Roads US Naval Base. The entire idea of cinema (light, audience, the projection of images, sound) is a frame through which we can observe events that are happening here and now. Onto the deteriorating walls, the afternoon light throws the images of a forest that has outgrown the military base and its environment. There’s no electricity here, all of the electrical wiring has been stolen.
La cabeza mató a todos / The head has killed everyone (2014) 7:33 min
The directions for destroying a war machine with a spell.
The cat explains to Michelle how magic is built.
We hear the voice of Michelle (through the cat).
ADDITIONAL PROJECTION
Otros usos / Other uses (2014) 6:52
The video was filmed from an old dock for petrol, a mile-and-a-half-long structure that was intended for servicing military ships, that today is used by fisherman as a new shoreline.
Flowers of Antimony, 2008, HD Video RT 36:20 min
The film researches the idea of radical work, focusing on the most basic of movements: the communal cleaning of a house, chopping, cooking, preparations for a fight, reading anarchist literature, etc. Through these activities, amateur performances and repetition, a surreal ethnography emerges in which personal histories are exchanged and shown in a new way on the basis of other subjective experiences. The video was created in 2008 as a part of a three-month residency at Wattis Institute/CCA in which the artist collaborated with anarchist and other radical groups.