Laura Lima. For the Love of Dissent / MUAC, Mexico City

In this video we have a look at Brazilian artist Laura Lima’s work for the new curatorial program Sexta Sur of Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). For the love of dissent is the title of the first series of exhibitions held as part of the Sexta Sur project. The artwork of Laura Lima takes the body as starting point and sets it in relation to the exhibition building and the landscape around the museum.

Laura Lima. For the Love of Dissent / MUAC, Mexico City. Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. February 9, 2013. Video by Diego Garcí­a Sotomoro.

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From the exhibition webpage:

For the love of dissent is the title of the first series of exhibitions held as part of the Sexta Sur project, comprising Edgardo Aragón (Mexico), Laura Lima (Brazil), Carlos Bunga (Portugal) and Marcela Armas (Mexico). Fundamental to the curators’ intention is for each of the proposals to take anti-gravity as a key vector, addressing the notion by way of a dissident reaction. Although the projects are presented separately, the intervention of each of these artists in the space generates an out-of-synch conversation between their practices on the basis of the idea of the local, global, historical, technological and performative, beginning with the shared horizon of dissidence.

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Laura Lima
For the love of dissent

The artwork of Laura Lima takes the body as its starting point, and integrates it as a material potential and as an object of knowledge and sensibility, as just another element in the configuration of the work in space. She produces living works in which the gesture takes on scale within the context of the installation. Rather than fitting pre-established categories such as the performance or the happening, Lima is interested in the “carnality” not only of living beings, but of things and the world. This is the basis of her glossaries such as her formula H=c-M=c [Man=flesh/woman=flesh] which since 1995 has generated a series of paradoxical works that reflect on the forms and meaning of the body in contemporary life.

Part of the same series, the work HcMc-Puxador [HcMc-Handle] joins For the love of dissent with the aim of challenging the meaning of the room as limitation and condition of the exhibition space. As such, the body does not follow a narrative, but rather activates the work to generate a displacement towards the exterior, revealing the height, distance and tension between the human scale and the dimensions of the building, while directing our attention to the landscape around the museum.

Sexta Sur

Sexta Sur is a new curatorial program that brings together four solo exhibitions each year by emerging artists from both Mexico and abroad, with the aim of creating a platform for alternatives and experimentation that enables a flow of divergent and spontaneous interventions that form an authentic dialogue. The sum of each artist’s occupation of the space at different times will combine such that each project may be considered a fraction of a whole: 1/4, 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4.

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