Noticias

---

Ends on May 14th

The Palais of Tokyo presents Héctor Zamora’s work

May 12, 2016

 Visitors were able to experience the exhibition Order and Progress, where the Mexican Héctor Zamora’s latest work was presented and will finish next weekend at the Palais of Tokyo in Paris.

It is five wooden fishing boats gathered in the city of New York, a space within the museum, with all its size and great height, it is equipped with large windows that transport you directly to the Seine River. That is how a parallel between the Mexican boats and the Parisian river is created.

However, the ships will be entirely destroyed and reduced to nothing by workers since its opening last May 4th , they have been daily breaking apart and destroying the work piece by piece on site.

On May 14th there will no longer be nothing left of the original work. Gradually, it will take the form of a ship cemetery, symbolizing the destruction and annihilation of all hope, as currently happens on the Mediterranean’s shores in relation to the immigration crisis in Europe.

Invited to exhibit at the Palais of Tokyo in Paris, the Mexican artist Héctor Zamora, who currently lives in Portugal, proposes a "performative" installation evoking powerfully the deconstruction of a symbolic universe that carries with it all hopes that once represented the navegation.

 These boats symbolize adventure and discovery, the hope of a shelter and the ability to survive the storm. "If in the past the ships were the food that nourished the imagination of great mythological epics, today they are a synonymous related to the humanitarian crisis of immigrants."

 With this exhibition Order and Progress, Héctor Zamora invites to reflect on the socio-economic models, which in turn are a continuation of his previous projects such as Atopic Delirium (2009) or Every Belgian is Born with a Brick in The Stomach (2008).

The title of this exhibition, Order and Progress, comes from the motto that adorns the light blue sphere of the Brazilian flag, and is also a version of the formula used by the French philosopher Auguste Comte in his Course on Positive Philosophy (1830) where he says: "Love as a principle, order as a basis and progress as a goal."

 This title establishes a contrast between the action to be performed while the duration of the exhibition, i.e. a structured and organized dismantling of ships process, and the central idea of this positivist thought about the order as the path to progress.

 Born in Mexico City in 1974, Héctor Zamora works from Lisbon, where he lives after nearly 10 years of living in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has made several major projects in the public space, in addition to individual shows in Mexico City, Paris, Los Angeles and Sao Paulo, to name a few cities. Also, he has exhibited in many collective displays, he has participated in numerous biennials in the world, including the Havana Biennial in Cuba; the Eighth Biennial Sculpture Shenzhenen in China (2014); the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey (2013) or the 53rd Venice Biennale in Italy (2009).

 

- What role do history and society impose what is right and what is wrong in a work of art?

 ­- All or none, is very subjective and depends on the type of work and the context in which it occurs.

 - You make a criticism based on the fact to inscribe a work of art to the continuity of the historical tradition, to the local identity of a place, or regarding what other artists did in the past. In which sense the speech of your work is in break with tradition, history, society and the influence of performance after the 60’s?

 - I do not consider that I am doing myself performance. Perhaps the word that comes closer to what I do is "action". Nevertheless, this word is not one hundred percent precise. I think that to define or classify the work of art in a movement, technique, style, continuity or tradition is not something relevant: what matters is that art is carried out.

 I think this question refers specifically to my work O abuso da história in which everything begins with an action without any specific content beyond throwing plants from the windows of a patio.

 On the contrary, the action performed at the Palais of Tokyo is fully connected to the local context, but also universal. By using the symbol of Bbarco as a vehicle I establish a relationship between context and countless connotations that could potentially have the action of violently break these ships that workers destroy daily using only hand tools. I propose a reflection on this.

 - Do you think that museums have democratized art? Or do you think they have helped to keep the art as an object for the "intellectual elite"?

- I believe that museums were never intended to help democratize art.

 -There is a large public that still does not understand the purpose of contemporary art, what do you attribute that to?

In the world there are many things that do not need to be understood, quite simply because there are things that are not important to us. I try to understand what I consider important to me. And I think the world has the right not to approach what it does not called the attention. I do not like football, for example, and I'm not worried on the fact of misunderstand or know about it. The same happens with art that does not seem attractive to me.

- Where does your need come from to go beyond the walls of museums and place your work in public space?

- The idea of the white cube: the sterility of classical exhibition spaces, motivate me very little. I am attracted to the chaos of the streets and the complexity of the rules and regulations that govern it. The public space attracts me, because it is alive and is a reflection of a universe where there are no limits.

- Your exhibition at the Palais of Tokyo, reminded me of the tragedy of the island of Lampedusa, where a boat sank with 500 immigrants running away from their countries at war, trying to reach European soil. Is Order and Progress a metaphor of the migratory cemetery in which has become the Mediterranean?

 -Yes.

 - What were the challenges of making this exhibition?

 - Many, but I'm very happy to have been able to show a type of work that in "theory" is not possible in countries like France, where tight security and regulatory standards of public spaces exist.

 - What did mean to you to exhibit at a place like the Palais of Tokyo?

- I consider it a museum out of the common standards, as its curatorial project too, which consists of an experimental program that gives space to all kinds of proposals. That is why, regarding an institutional museum, the Palais of Tokyo was one of the best places to display this work.

 - Do you consider yourself an activist?

- Yes.

Mexico,Distrito Federal