Monday, July 18, 2011

The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City presents Enrique Jezik

Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, MUAC

Enrique Ježik:
Obstruct, Destroy, Conceal
11 June-November 2011

Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, MUAC
Insurgentes Sur 3000
Centro Cultural Universitario
Delegación Coyoacán. C.P. 04510
México D.F.
T +52 (55) 5622 69 39 +52 (55) 5622 69 72
difusion@muac.unam.mx
www.muac.unam.mx <http://www.muac.unam.mx>

? The exhibition displays for the very first time an extensive review of the
works and projects of an artist that has played a key role in the narrative
of
Mexican contemporary art

? It is organized in six sections relating to the concepts of violence
devices, spaces and operations.

In the last two decades Enrique Ježik (Cordoba, Argentina, 1961) has
deployed
a complex work of exploring the structures and devices of power,
surveillance,
repression, control and violence, from within the polymorphic practice of
contemporary sculpture. For this artist, sculpture is a way of thinking
power
and violence as a stubborn drive on body matter. His performances, videos,
and
specific interventions that involve tactics--ranging from the use of bullets
to
Braille writing--testify to a historical period where the means of
destruction
and control technologies create the spaces, metaphors, devices and paths of
politics.

The exhibition Enrique Ježik: Obstruct, Destroy, Conceal displays for the
very
first time an extensive review of the works and projects of an artist that
has
played a key role in the narrative of Mexican contemporary art.

Organized in six sections relating to the concepts of violence devices,
spaces
and operations ("Obstruction," "Destruction," "Concealment," "The Enemy's
Body," "Operations Theater" and "Sacrificial Constructivism"), the
exhibition--curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina--travels over the territory of
objects,
forces and images, put together by Ježik while musing on the symbolic and
technical relationship of sculpture with domination devices.

The keenest focus of Ježik's recent work has been the exploration of visual
and physical power, and both the iconography and the effects of the weapon
as
a prosthesis of the body and an instrument of destruction. The weapon
appears
in his work in a multiple sense: as an equivalent predecessor to the
sculptor's hammer and chisel of the sculptor and as a sculptural artifact of
power and violence. While the use of rifles and pistols has long been
present
in art--all over the second half of the twentieth century--Ježik emphasizes
the
physical dimension of arms as a historical and aesthetic vector.

"We live, in a single schizophrenic gesture, in a civilization
simultaneously
obsessed with and haughtily indifferent to violence," said Cuauhtémoc
Medina.
"We live in a historical period where the political alternatives are
dissolved
and the main purpose of society would seem to be security and control, where
power claims to exist in order to address the alleged proliferation of
internal and external enemies, managing and consciously or unconsciously
transforming all social conflict in a military or law enforcement issue.
This
climate is the political moment outlined in Ježik's work, not in offering
tactics to escape this hegemony, but in witnessing it through sensitive
operations."

Complementing the exhibition, MUAC will release the book Enrique Ježik:
Obstruct, Destroy, Conceal, a comprehensive collection of the works of the
Argentinean-Mexican sculptor. Edited by Cuauhtémoc Medina, this highly
illustrated volume includes an interview and philosophical, historical and
aesthetic essays by José Luis Barrios, Néstor García Canclini and David
Goldberg.

Enrique Ježik: Obstruct, Destroy, Conceal is part of the core exhibitions
within Fantasmas de la libertad (Ghosts of Freedom), a cycle that gathers
artistic proposals that not only suggest specific points of view, but engage
in taking a stance with regard to current common conflicts throughout Latin
America.

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