Michelle-Marie Letelier: Am I ancient or a human made machine?
Guest curated with Paz Guevara
in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Toronto and the Blue Cabin Residency.
How do exhibitions have the capacity to create moments of communality rather than objectifying the beings that enter into its modern grid? How does the exhibition become permeable to life through orality, reciprocity, and in connection with geopolitical trajectories, struggles, and potential alliances? In a partly speculative and partly documentary manner, artist Michelle-Marie Letelier weaves a series of collaborations through virtual reality, songs, crystal performances, conversations, and in-situ actions. Against the grain of extractivism, this exhibition engages the poethics of a sovereign ocean through the consciousness and memory of our fellow being, the salmon: Am I ancient or human-made machine?
The Artist
Michelle-Marie Letelier: currently located in Berlin, she obtained her Bachelor of Arts from the Universidad Católica de Chile in 2000 and has participated in postgraduate programmes such as Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT (Berlin) and as guest student in the Experimental Media Design studies at the Universität der Künste (Berlin).Her work has been shown internationally in biennials, galleries, museums and institutions, among others: Gropius-Bau (Berlin); Kunstmuseum Bonn; Stanislavsky Electrotheatre (Moscow); Screen City Biennial 2019 (Stavanger); Bienal Sur 2017 (Buenos Aires); El Museo de Los Sures (New York); Kunsthall 3,14 (Bergen); Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Santiago); Errant Bodies (Berlin); Museum of Contemporary Art (Santiago); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago) and Kommunale Galerie Charlottenburg (Berlin).
Her videos and VR have been exhibited in international screenings and festivals, including: The Arctic Arts Festival (Harstad); Videonale.18 (Bonn); VRHAM! Festival; WE ARE OCEAN 2019-2021 (Berlin and Marseille); East Asia Contemporary Art Space (Shanghai); 5. Mercosur Biennial (Porto Alegre) and X Video and Media Arts Biennial (Santiago).
The Curator
Paz Guevara is a curator, researcher and author based in Berlin. Currently, she is collaborating in the long-term project Kanon-Fragen at Haus der Kulturen der Welt - HKW in Berlin, Germany. In this context, she has been one of the curators of the exhibition Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017-2018); and curator of the Afro-Sonic Mapping project by musician and artist Satch Hoyt (2019). Also as researcher, she has contributed to the exhibition Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978, with research on South American artists, museums and networks involved in the Solidarity Movement. Guevara has been co-curator of the Latin American Pavilion at the 55th and 54th Venice Biennial (2013 and 2011), In Other Words at NGBK in Berlin (2012), and co- editor of the homonymous book with guest authors: Sarat Maharaj and Beatriz Sarlo, and curator of Comunidad Ficticia, in Matucana 100, Santiago (2009), among others. She has conducted several workshops and seminars on curating and exhibition histories, and she has written extensively on contemporary artistic practices, most recently, on the works of Beatriz González and Olaf Holzapfel for Documenta 14.
About Or Gallery
The Or Gallery is an artist-run centre committed to exhibiting work by local, national, and international artists whose art practice is of a critical, conceptual and/or interdisciplinary nature. Since its inception in 1983 the gallery has acted as a space for research, proposition making, conceptual experimentation and documentation.
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Or Gallery