Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, That which identifies them like the
eye of the Cyclops, 2015.
Production still. Courtesy the artist and Galería Agustina Ferreyra
Production still. Courtesy the artist and Galería Agustina Ferreyra
PR ART NEWS -“Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Song, Strategy, Sign”
marks the first New York museum solo exhibition of Puerto Rican artist Beatriz
Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico). In her recent film and video
work, Santiago Muñoz has documented the lives of individuals—political
dissidents, teachers, and farmers—who are deeply invested in political transformation.
The subjects of her films and videos reveal their close physical connections to
their environments, sites marked by legacies of colonial trade and military
occupation in the artist’s homeland of Puerto Rico, by recounting stories and
engaging natural materials as well as inherited or handmade objects. Her
exhibition at the New Museum is presented in the Fifth Floor gallery as part of
the Education and Public Engagement Department’s R&D Season: LEGACY and
explores the ways in which our connections to the past are actively produced, maintained,
and refuted. “Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Song, Strategy, Sign” is on view to June
12, 2016.
For her exhibition and residency at the New Museum, Santiago
Muñoz premieres a new three-channel video That which identifies them like the
eye of the Cyclops (2016) and a new silent 16mm film Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The
Dead/Forces (2016). The three parts of Santiago Muñoz’s video That which
identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops are titled as a sequence: One/Song,
Two/Strategy, and Three/Signs. The footage emerged from years of contact
between Santiago Muñoz and a group of women, and each video channel corresponds
loosely to a different theme in Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères,
which describes a world where the patriarchy has fallen after a bloody war
between the sexes. Like Les Guérillères, the video closely follows the
sensorial and material worlds of the women and imagines a post-patriarchal
future. Unlike the characters in Wittig’s novel, the women portrayed in
Santiago Muñoz’s video are real, and the story is rooted in the specific place
and time that they inhabit—including Caribbean cities, bankrupted states, and
coastal towns. The video documents the injured farm animals that the women care
for, a concert on a beach at night, a frenzied
club, and a protest campsite in front of government buildings.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, That which identifies them like the
eye of the Cyclops, 2015. Production still. Courtesy the artist and Galería
Agustina Ferreyra
Santiago Muñoz’s exhibition at the New Museum also features
a set of commissioned masks, which will be activated in a series of new films
and videos made during the artist’s residency this spring. The masks will be
featured in a performance by one of the women in That which identifies them
like the eye of the Cyclops, Macha Colón (the stage name of Gisela Rosario
Ramos, a queer performer in the underground music scene in Puerto Rico), in the
New Museum Theater on June 2, 2016.
Santiago Muñoz’s 16mm
film Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces portrays subjects— people, places,
and things—she has come to know through previous projects. The film was shot on
the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, which was the site of a bombing range used
by the US Navy for sixty years and is still filled with unexploded bombs. The
film weaves together images of a man who cares for horses that roam the old
target range where the bombs lie, a black magnetite beach that is slowly
eroding, an artist who has helped to resurrect a sacred tree that was once on
the naval base and who has herself been resurrected from illness more than once,
and a man who hopes his ritual movements will return the island of Vieques to a
cosmic balance. Together, their stories tell interlacing accounts of land, toxic
bombings, political work, celebration, and death.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops, 2015. Production still. Courtesy the artist and Galería Agustina Ferreyra
Santiago Muñoz captures the aspirations and imagined futures
of those who are deeply invested in alternative models of being, using the
stories of farmers, activists, and artists working in Puerto Rico as allegories
for larger political possibilities in the region. The film, three-channel
video, and masks in “Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Song, Strategy, Sign” serve as testaments
to the individuals who forge their own terms for how to live, remember, and
advance their own evolving histories.
This exhibition is co-curated by Johanna Burton, Keith
Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement; Lauren Cornell,
Curator and Associate Director, Technology Initiatives; and Sara O’Keeffe,
Assistant Curator.
Exhibition: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Song, Strategy, Sign runs
through June 12, 2016 at New Museum, 235 Bowery, NY Hours: Wednesday - Sunday:
11am - 6pm - on Thursday until 9pm - closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Fotografías
extraídas de la web de New Museum a quienes agradecemos su colaboración. Las imágenes
se publican exclusivamente para la promoción de la exposición, la galería y los
artistas y está prohibida su reproducción en cualquier medio.
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