Culture – Afghan artists under threat from the Taliban, while art wins at ‘Bienalsur Argentina’

Repression, death, exile. The creators of Afghanistan are no strangers to the reality of these words, which do not cease to resonate with the coming to power of the Taliban. After their conquest of Kabul, graffiti artist Shamsia Hassani and film director Sahraa Karimi had no choice but to leave. Flight that neither the comedian Nazar / Khasha nor the singer Fawad Andarabi could choose, executed by the group. The film of the year ‘Annette’ and Natalio Cosoy from San Juan complete the chronicle.

This week in Culture We traveled from Afghanistan to Argentina to remember that despite the darkness of a reality, art, culture in general, always maintains its light. Either from outside the country of origin, as is the case of the aforementioned Afghan women, who in addition to their complaint are and were persecuted by the Government and the Taliban because of their gender; or either from the natural territory.

Here comes the Argentine land, from where the international biennial of contemporary art Bienalsur arose, which this year, and despite the absences, has faced the pandemic with a “global art in a local key”. This is indicated by our correspondent and sent to San Juan Natalio Cosoy, who signs the following text.

Young people in the Bienalsur artistic installation in San Juan, Argentina. © Ricardo Dawson

This 2021 the third edition of Bienalsur, which was born in Argentina as an initiative of the University of Tres de Febrero, but extends to more than 124 venues in 50 cities around the world, with the works of some 400 creators. That is geographically. Temporarily, openings are taking place at different venues, which are building the global framework of the biennial.

This August 20 and 21 it was the turn of the city of San Juan, capital of the province of the same name, in the west of the country and on the Andes mountain range. Taking Bienalsur outside the national capitals is part of the heart of the project: going to the local to dialogue with the global.

“An exhibition in a large international museum is as important to us as an exhibition in a city in the interior of any country, because it allows us to reach people,” Bienalsur director Aníbal Jozami emphasized to France 24.

In addition, he said, “if the global does not have the local, it becomes the globalization of the great powers, the globalization of the great institutions, we are totally against that.”

Thus, in San Juan, the works present, almost all by international artists, contrast with the absence of their creators, something especially marked in this edition in which the Covid-19 pandemic imposed greater restrictions.

“We practically do not transfer absolutely any work from one country to another, due to the pandemic, but also a bit as a work attitude, as a work posture, that what is important is the aesthetic experience that this exhibition offers the viewer and not so much the fetish of the object, the artifact, museable or marketable, “Florence Batitti, of the Bienalsur curatorial team, told this medium.

Image of the circle recreated by Proyecto Baldío. © Bienalsur

If almost all the works of the ten participating artists were manufactured in San Juan, such as the two dice measuring two meters by two meters and weighing 100 kilograms each by the Japanese Yutaka Sone (a hyperbolic reference and in a random humor key, to the loss of control) or the performance of the Belgian Gert Robijns, executed by San Juan from Proyecto Baldío, the question remains: whose work is it, whose performance is it?

“To think if today in our world it is still possible to have an absolutely disinterested attitude”

For the collective Proyecto Baldío, whose name was born from its original artistic proposal to intervene with art in the uninhabited vacant lots, it was the first experience of its kind. “It was taking a work by another artist and rethinking it and recontextualizing it here in San Juan,” Carla Monguilner, a member of the project, explained to France 24.

The performance, which is called ‘Reset Mobile’, was carried out in a mining area of ​​the province. On the parched ground, Monguilner is seen making a circle. The curators of the exhibition develop: “The circle is the archetype, a form that connects man with infinity. In the circle, the beginning and the end overlap.”

Martín Quiroga, from Proyecto Baldío, stated that it was interesting for them to be “as a labor force for that artist, to produce his work in this place, in a mine, which is declared cultural heritage, which is being re-exploited by a foreign capital company “. Because, he added, “that dialogue seemed very interesting to us and it was also what motivated us a bit to accept the job.”

As Batitti said, it was a question of “working with an international exhibition, with international curators, but that the production of the sample was local and that it provided work and moved, in some way, and activated the local economy of San Juan.”

In a world fundamentally guided by social, emotional and financial profit, “givers” appear as a strange species that contributes and collaborates with others without expecting anything in return.

– BIENALSUR (@BIENALSURarte) August 18, 2021

Give the work to other hands, give in, give.

The exhibition at the Franklin Rawson Museum of Fine Arts, one of the two San Juan venues of Bienalsur, is precisely called ‘Dar y Dar’. It is, in Batitti’s phrase, a kind of challenge that artists and curators throw to the public: “To think if today in our world it is still possible to have an absolutely disinterested attitude that launches towards others an action that does not expect any retribution”.

“Art cannot modify society, but art can make people think”

The other headquarters of Bienalsur San Juan is the Birthplace of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who was born in that city in 1811 and is considered the father of public education in Argentina. There the exhibition ‘A furnace for two tables’ was installed, in a tribute to the Argentine conceptual artist Víctor Grippo, who died in 2002.

Inside the building there are two works: ‘Naturalize man, humanize nature’, a long table covered with dozens and dozens of potatoes, along with flasks and other typical laboratory containers, filled with colored liquids; and ‘The artist’s food’, an elegant table, with six plates in a row, with very little food each.

The other work, a performance, took place in the courtyard. It was a recreation of ‘Construction of a popular oven to make bread’, which Grippo himself had made in 1972, together with the artist Jorge Gamarra and a rural worker named Rossi. That year they built a clay oven in the capital of the country, Buenos Aires, to bake bread and distribute it among those who were there. Argentina was then ruled by a dictatorship. The work was censored and destroyed.

Image of the artist with the popular oven, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, September 1972. © Víctor Grippo / Jorge Gamarra

The three works exhibited in the Sarmiento Natal House link, among others, the themes of food, art, nature and community. Víctor Grippo’s adoptive daughter, Paulina Vera, was present at the inauguration.

“Just like when Grippo gun it in ’72 and the police destroyed it the next day because it generated and visualized a lot of things that were happening at that historical moment, this work always visualizes the need and the possibility that people have to form a community “he told France 24.

A community that, in the case of Bienalsur, also unites presences and absences, past and present, the local and the global. Its creators call this edition of Bienalsur the “biennial of resilience and resistance”.

In that sense, there are many messages that this nomadic event intends to install in each place where it stops; there is one, perhaps, that is the most revolutionary. This is how Aníbal Jozami says: “Art cannot change the world, art cannot modify society, but art can make people think and those people who begin to think are the ones who are going to modify the world.”

A task that the biennial is doing from venue to venue, city to city.

In Argentina, before the inauguration in San Juan – it will be open until November 28 – was the one in Salta, a northwestern province, neighboring Bolivia. This week a sample of the biennial opens in the City of Buenos Aires. And then the cities of Córdoba and Rosario will follow, in the center of the country.

Each one is fully representative of that network that the biennial seeks to establish globally, but is also completed in the others. Thus, growing in geography and unfolding over time, Bienalsur is being constituted.

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source https://pledgetimes.com/culture-afghan-artists-under-threat-from-the-taliban-while-art-wins-at-bienalsur-argentina/