The XI Lanzarote Art Biennial returns in its second phase after the success experienced during the month of September in the context of historical memory. There will be five exhibitions that will address themes such as immigration, women, and borders, with Latin America as a backdrop.
This second phase is structured around five discourses and a participatory workshop that will be represented by an artist from the island of Lanzarote and four highly relevant international artists from Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and Romania.
One of the speakers present will be Tania Candiani, with her work "Eyes Under the Shadow", a project that began with Camouflage (2020) in which Candiani recreated Dorothea Lang's 1942 photographs in which American women of Japanese origin imprisoned in concentration camps wove huge camouflage nets, thus making forced labor visible. For this Biennial, the artist invites women from the archipelago to emulate the work of those prisoners, but this time with strips dyed with cochineal, showing how migrations derived from trade interweave a network capable of changing societies, even the landscape of a territory.
This exhibition can be enjoyed at the MIAC - International Museum of Contemporary Art of the Castillo de San José from November 17th to January 31st of next year.
The Cuban artist, Carlos Martiel, will project Mediterranean, a video of the performance in which he himself is immersed in a cube of water from the Mediterranean Sea that gradually fills up. In this project, the artist alludes to immigration and documentation policies and to the symbol of freedom and a humanity that is often denied to immigrants and refugees. In the words of Eduardo Carrera, "Carlos embodies the experience of migration, because the individual who is migrating by instinct of survival believes that the life he leads is not worth much, he is not afraid of death, he is not afraid of drowning. Martiel reminds us in this project that we live in an anti-black society and what it costs to maintain breathing in the Black body. Resisting for a bearable life so that racialized subjects have spaces to breathe... With breathing comes imagination. With breathing, possibilities arise."
For his part, Marcos Montiel Soto, with "Tropical Parallelism of Absence", explores the intersections between political and poetic territories, traditions, archeology, myths, death, cosmos, and chaos. The MIAC will host in its Pancho Lasso Room the two works that the artist presents in this biennial.
On the one hand, a video with two protagonist maracas that dance in the Canary Islands, in a surreal and volcanic landscape in the surroundings of Teseguite. And on the other hand, an installation in which the colonization of the new world and the tricontinental slave trade intersect in this transatlantic bridge with black masks and maracas, migratory flows and social surrealism, symbology and mixed-race culture, sarcophagi and pirates.
Marius Ionut Scarlat in collaboration with Veintinueve Trece and within the framework of the Lanzarote Photography and Visual Arts Meeting, presents his individual exhibition "Three days, eight days, forty days", from January 4 to 15 at La Casa Amarilla. An exhibition that presents the home as a central axis through the monitoring of funeral rituals. The home understood as a physical, but also psychological and emotional space that acts as a reflection of the social and economic context.
Starting from his own experiences, he delves into the orthodox mortuary rites of Romanian culture, from which he comes, and raises a reflection on how we manage emotions around death, both in public and in private.
From November 18 to March 1, 2023, the Mexican artist Ximena Labra presents Tlatelolco Public Space Odyssey at the CIC El Almacén thanks to an agreement in collaboration with the MUAC (University Museum of Contemporary Art of Mexico). Inspired, in part, by the principle of the visionary film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by Stanley Kubrick, which represents the discovery of a mysterious and minimalist sculpture in outer space, the artist Ximena Labra designed a strategy to infuse hallucinatory powers into the monument to the victims of Tlatelolco.
The Biennial until March 2023
This Biennial will have, until the end of March, a program structured in four collective exhibitions, three individual ones, five projections, three cycles of conferences, a round table, a performance, and an action in neighborhoods of the island.
In the month of March, there will be projections by the artists Patty Chang, Jenny Jaramillo, and Mónica Mayer, as well as the collective 'The words that we do not yet possess' curated by Semíramis González and works by Marina Vargas, Carmela García, Shadi Gharidian, Doris Salcedo, Martha Rosler, Julia Galán, and Agnes Essonti.
The culmination of the Biennial will be the round table 'We are not just a body: breast cancer and the rupture of the patriarchal canon in art' with Marina Vargas and Teresa Correa and moderated by Semíramis González.
María Dolores Corujo, president of the Cabildo, has pointed out that "this Biennial is making visible structural problems that society must address urgently and with extreme sensitivity because they affect people who, on many occasions, are dispossessed of their rights, and even of their own lives, for the simple fact of dreaming of a better day-to-day life."
The CEO of the Entity, Benjamín Perdomo, and the artistic director of the Biennial, Adonay Bermúdez, have been in charge of announcing the most relevant aspects of a program that will be focused on the analysis of the migratory phenomenon in a globalized society of the 21st century in the course of an informative conference in which they were accompanied by the Mexican artist Tania Candiani and the Venezuelan Marcos Montiel Soto.
"We want to continue being the driving force behind the cultural flows of the island with a meeting that becomes the best showcase to project the work and talent of the artists who give life to the program of this Biennial of the Tourist Centers," explained Perdomo.
