DaWire

Hannes Zebedin: Political Minimalism at AREA

This past November AREA: Lugar de Proyectos invited Austrian artist Hannes Zebedin (Lienz, 1976) to take up residence in AREA’s exhibition space in Caguas, Puerto Rico,  where he created a series of site-specific minimal interventions resulting from first-hand observation and investigation (through casual conversations) of the island’s political and socio-economic climate. Zebedin, a seasoned traveler, is often invited to international spaces and institutions to create temporary interventions that respond to particular political contexts, redefined and interpreted through the discerning eye of the ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger.’ In this particular context, Puerto Rico’s elegantly worded yet ambiguous political status figured predominantly in Zebedin’s work.[...]

Performance art lends itself to the utilization of the body as a resource, a space for discussion and a mechanism for discourse. Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan performance artist that uses her body to denounce social and political injustices, but also to address issues related to sexuality and women.[...]

For today’s installment of Sexual Deployment: The Body as Method for Discourse we present work from artist Janine Antoni. Antoni utilizes her body as both a mechanism for making art and an art object. Antoni sculpts with her teeth and even paints with her hair, exploring the physicality of the body as well as social and cultural constructions of femininity.[...]

The title Sexual Deployment is taken from Michel Foucault’s seminal work The History of Sexuality, where he analyzes the politics of power surrounding our approach to sexuality. In it, Foucault defines what he calls ‘the deployment of alliance’ and ‘the deployment of sexuality,’ two opposing systems that address sexuality in completely different ways and where power is a game that centers on the body.[...]

We want to provide our readers with more than just news on artists and exhibitions, that’s why once a month we will bring you one full week dedicated to a particular theme or subject, presenting contemporary artists within a curatorial, conceptual or theoretical framework. Sexual Deployment: The Body as Method for Discourse presents five women artists that use their bodies as a political and social space to address issues of sexuality, feminism and femininity.[...]