[spectre] Regional Meeting of Art, Montevideo/UG

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Regional Meeting of Art
Region: Frictions and Fictions
Art in Transit -- A dialogue with history
Montevideo 2007, Uruguay (Mvd-Era07)
August 9 to September 30

Blanes Museum
National Museum of Visual Arts
Spanish Cultural Centre of Montevideo


Concept and production:
Blanes Museum and Friends of Blanes Musem
Millán 4015-11700 Montevideo
598 2 3362248

<
http://www.encuentroregionaldearte.org.uy> 
http://www.encuentroregionaldearte.org.uy
<
http://www.era.org.uy> http://www.era.org.uy



The Friends of the Blanes Museum are pleased to 
announce the Official Launch of the international 
project Regional Meeting of Art. Region: 
Frictions and Fictions. Art in transit- A 
dialogue with history (Mdv-Era07), which will 
take place in Montevideo, Uruguay. The idea is to 
create a continuous event from August 9 through 
to September 30, 2007, marked by an essentially 
binding and polemical character. The project will 
be held in differents venues as the Blanes 
Museum, the National Museum of Visual Arts, the 
Spanish Cultural Centre of Montevideo, but also 
in urban spaces as a site for the interventions 
of contemporary artists.

It is the first more important international 
exhibition in Montevideo.Conceived to promote the 
dialogue between an ERA world-region project 
(which includes a historical exhibtion and a 
contemporary international art exhibition) and an 
ERA city-region project (with the participation 
of artists from the local art scene), it will 
include different formats of contemporary 
artistic practices, together with the 
organisation of conference cycles and theoretical 
debates, with the publications of the records and 
dissemination of the event.

The project organized in is structured on the 
idea of contributing to generate active links 
between people who work in the areas of artistic 
creativity and thinking, and those who develop 
knowledge on the basis of research in social 
sciences, anthropology and political sciences.The 
selected central theme for all interventions by 
artists and analysts will revolve around the 
contemporary crisis of the concept of 'region'. 
The border policies, the multicultural dynamism 
created by migration and the stigma -- oftentimes 
-- of risk, of clandestinity, and the rupture and 
pervading effect of urban life on the public and 
private spheres, the subtle forms of cultural 
colonialism in the framework of an economically 
globalised world and, finally, the crisis of 
place suffered by subjects in this context, are 
some of the factors that will be approached 
through the view of contemporary art, in a 
dialogue with the view of XIXth Century 
"regionalist art" (Argentine, Brazil, Paraguay 
and Urug uay) images gathered for the first time 
in an ehibition.

Era region-world project:
Regional Art of the 19th Century. History of art 
was put together from a European perspective and 
centred on the succession of stylistic changes, 
and later on the succession of the avant-gardes. 
This accounts for the need of the art from the 
Rio de la Plata to find a perspective to 
"deconstruct" the heavy burden of European 
historiographical tradition. With this exhibition 
project we advocate that the visual culture of 
liberalism has subjected the regional visual 
tradition, and the existing silence on this issue 
has persisted in the construction of the 
histories of art.

La Cuadratura del Cono / Border Jam attempts to 
respond to current issues on the concept of 
region, establishing a dialogue with the 
historical art exhibition of the 19th Century. It 
seeks to suggest, in an impressive and 
metaphorical manner, the existing tensions in the 
physical, social, cultural and intellectual 
borders of our times. The curatorial approach of 
La Cuadratura del Cono shall not be specific. It 
will not provide direct comments on the 
historical processes of the 19th Century, but 
rather introduce works of art that refer, in a 
complex, critical and provocative manner, to the 
outcomes of these processes -- borders, states, 
nationalism, power structures -- as we experience 
them today. It will gather 19 artists from 11 
countries: Monica Bonvicini; Luis Camnitzer; 
Claudia Casarino; Claudio Correa; Jose Damasceno; 
Lucia Egaña; Shilpa


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