Invenciones Modernas at Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá, Bogotá (Colombia)

The artists Bernardo Ortiz, David Peí±a, Fredy Buitrago and Luis Fernando Ramí­rez present works that deal with modernity in an exhibition in Bogota (Colombia), curated by David Ayala Alfonso and Sylvia Juliana Suarez. This is the first video by our new correspondents in Colombia, David Perilla and Jhoneferson Castro.

Invenciones Modernas at Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá, Centro Empresarial Chapinero, Colombia. Opening reception, July 19, 2012. Video by David Perilla and Jhoneferson Castro.

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Statement by the curators:

Modern Inventions
The artists gathered in Modern Inventions suggests exercises to think about modernity, holding a battle between “being” and “would have been.” His works are scenarios and / or scenes on specific aspects of modernity (from science, geopolitics, art, architecture or design) are “fictions” (historical, scientific, geographic, monumental) for restoring the heterogeneity and imperfection of the experience of modernity.

F. Buitrago, B. Ortiz, D. Pena and L.F. Ramirez (hereinafter FB, BO, DP and LFR) show versions of modernity, there are fragmentary and anecdotal, scattered in everyday life, but whose origin is difficult to determine. Its fragments are found as historical documents or as elements involved in the material culture that emerged from the fierce modern invention, when mixed with false operations, people, institutions and experiments, the artists in the exhibition comprise a cryptic thriller about modernity. Each of the modern inventions is an exercise in evaluation of the form, intensity and nature of these marginal versions of modernity: Why are they there? or why are they so?

(A) Modern World
The frenzy with which the modern utopias expanded by the globe, came the “modern world”: a mixture of concrete works and institutions and spectral presences (hegemony of the modernist approach) because it is not only the productions that were performed from their ideals, but of systems of judgment which he founded.
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Modernist matrix, mother and stepmother wicked generous from the point of view, still powerful in revealing the hopes and conflicts of the contemporary world. Criticism of the “modern world” is urgent. For there are worlds that it is not enough, and worlds (traditional and possible) to tears. It is not easy, it is both over-write the consciousness of the past, low and marginal, on the other, even hegemonic, and to release the images of the future that are entrenched between the present and the past. It is impossible to critique the modern world under the unique threads of memory, history and memory. Frames are required, nets and traps.

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