PARATEXT #28 with Claudio Correa, Rae Yuping Hsu, Victoria DeBlassie & Connor Maley, Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni

Paratext hides a monthly program of presentations by artists in residency in Hangar, always on Wednesday from 7 pm to 9.30 pm. Several artists present in various formats specific projects or parts of their works. The meetings are always opened based to the public in order to enable interaction with the artists themselves.

Next session will take place on Wednesday, July 18th at 7 pm in Hangar at Ricson space. The following artists will present their work:

Claudio Correa

His work has been devoted to a critical commentary of History, problematizing representation devices and power structures in the context of modernity. He has also dealt with hierarchies to which subjects are subjected, on the analysis of discourses, practices and technologies crossing the symbolic and political links between Europe and Latin America.

This body of work is both research and a recreation of different forms of institutional emblems and period utensils, upon unused objects that are part of historiographical records. Through documentary research, he has re-materialized these objects, to question the geopolitical and visual history of present-day Hispano-America. His intention is to unveil history’s power matrices in the different phases of westernization. The product of his findings are installations, collages, photographs, and videos, appropriating elements of a “monumentalist sculpture” typical of the “modern project”. His formal strategies subvert this iconography, characterized by symmetry, durability and stability, by creating sculptural similes and giving them mobility.

With his work he tries to give an account of the banality and narcissism present in the hegemonic representation of power and its influence in the conformation of contemporary identity. Under these guidelines, he seeks an interaction and crossing of traditional visual practices with technological and digital devices, broadening the understanding of our reality with approaches that generate a critical space of reflection that involves diverse territories, cultures and aesthetics.

Rae Yuping Hsu

The taiwanese artist who was trained in the field of rehabilitation medicine. Her practice revolves around the body, weaving to and fro the gray area defining abled, disabled, enabled bodies. With her practice she seeks to negotiate the slippage space within the discourse of addition and subtraction to propose that the body and its otherness were always already one. Working across several mediums including kinetic sculptures, glass, and biological materials, she creates “prostheses” of things felt as a lack; of intimate interfaces and body without organs; of cuts and connective tissue; of the foreign and the familiar. She anticipates a process of becoming and through her works she questions and explores the degree of agency that technology will allow its user, as well as the intimacy and vulnerability of these unions. Where is the boundary between the person and the prosthesis? Where does one stop and the other begin? How do we understand our place and placement in a multiplicity of approaches to ever-changing conditions of borders and bordering? She received an MFA from RISD, and several awards, grants, and residencies. Her works have been shown in museums, galleries and art festivals including Taipei digital art festival, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, National Taipei Museum of the Arts.

Victoria DeBlassie & Connor Maley

Their recent collaborations examine the intersection between their two respective art practices: visual arts and fiction. In Victoria’s individual art practice, she operates as an ethnoarchaeologist, mining her immediate surroundings to discover material remains and detritus and what these findings say about contemporary life, cultural values, and their relationship to history. She recontextualizes discarded objects and materials to create art that suggests the excessiveness of material culture by collecting trash and searching through our ever-amassing mass to unearth and create a novel kind of vitality. Connor’s writings are comprised of a language-centric channeling of trauma, pain, and the attempted recovery of what gets lost under the weight of macroscopic and microscopic forms of oppression, authoritarianism, and other systems of disenfranchisement, making use of history, politics, and theory to collapse time and history into a bizarre, surreal, bleakly comic tapestry where language interlocks everything into narratives connecting characters to ancestors, historical figures to invented protagonists, exhuming the past and inserting it within the present like a palimpsest. In collaboration, they meld their interests together to explore how layers of time and history affect present day political, social and cultural life.

Their current collaboration explores how language and culture are connected in such an inextricable way that one could assert that language tells the story of a culture by virtue of its very existence, and the continued presence of one determines the continuation of the other. Concentrating on the Catalan language and culture, they are incorporating social practice, found text, prose sequences and poetic fragments written in different registers in an installation to make connections about the importance and the conservation of language. Their project explores this concept generally but also specifically in terms of the important role of Catalan in Catalunya, especially at this critical moment, a place where the region’s language policy in prioritizing Catalan and firmly establishing a bilinguality with an emphasis on speaking Catalan in Catalan institutions has been under attack by federal powers for years and which is under attack at this very moment in a potently aggressive way.

Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni

First trained at his home country at Tétouan’s National Institute of Beaux-Arts before moving to Brussels to complete a Master in Sculpture at the ENSAV La Cambre. Since graduating in 2016, he lives in residence at Gent’s HISK within the framework of a Post-Graduate.

He uses photography, installation, video, sculpture and sound to create frank, direct pieces. He is gifted with an instinct for images and forms that suggest more than they reveal through their many layers of interpretations. Far from being illustrative, his attempt falls within the scope of a metaphorical relationship and universal preoccupations broaches on the world and the obsessions linked to the strong ties binding life and death.

 

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