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UHIM

Heterogeneous Unity of Moving Images is a curatorial collective that focuses on researching (contemporary) moving images and virtuality, interested in images that expand, question and transform the production of the real. We conceive the moving image as a technique and poetic of the habitability of the future.
Conscious of early 21st century participatory and collective work methodologies of free culture. We are based in Bogota and London.


Ways to inhabit the screen
The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are in ­folded (...) Since the virtual is unlivable even as it happens, it can be thought of as a form of superlinear abstraction (...) that is organized differently but is inseparable from the concrete activity and expressivity of the body.
—Brian Massumi

Faced with a future that is increasingly chaotic, we imagine the possibility of becoming a screen: living, acting and looking through electronic flows of movement and parallel temporalities. How many ways can we inhabit the screen? What devices allow us to access it? What possible worlds do they show us? In trying to answer these questions, we selected artists for three spaces: Appearances, Situations and Invocations, in which we proposed to occupy the concept of virtuality as a means of affection, coexistence and narratives.

The show opens with invocations as an experience of animistic communication, which allows us to break the distance between objects and subjects, virtuality and hyperhumanity. In Thinking of Invertebrates, naabteeri rewrites what we know as natural through the use of electronic means, presenting arthropods, fungi, plants, mammals, microbes, spaces, micro landscapes, and other organisms (even extraterrestrials). By the agency of an encoded voice the Anthropocene is drawn through descriptions of a trip to Serbia. In this colonization of microorganisms, the existence of invertebrates immortalizes. In the work Conversations with the Makapansgat Pebble, by Luke Mccreadie, new materialities are presented with liquidity and apparent smoothness. The animation of the archeological Makapansga pebble—the first index of symbolic thinking— appears in a series of scenarios that represent a set of anxieties about our relations with objects of today, dreamed by software that can never be touched.

To find situations is to intensify the relationship between form and content. These video installations produce speeches that allow us to navigate between the real and hyperreal politically questioning the production spaces. Léa Porré in Law of Ruins: Alexander the Great analyzes the fetishization of ruin in popular culture. It forms an alternative narrative of archeological sites of the future taken from the scenes of buried films. The Keiken collective invites us into an eroticism of the virtual as a sensitive possibility of the other mechanic, modeling hybrid, wet and open bodies. In VITAL FORCE {PRANA} a video filmed in corporate spaces, they discuss the protection of the earth and the protection of the invisible within us through a digital makeup mask.

Sebastián Mira and Rocio Pardo propose a change of scale of habitable places. Intentions of Rocío Pardo, by interaction, poses the metaphor of crossing the void of an abyss through horizontal and vertical lines, referring to the vertical movement of the waterfall and the horizontal movement of Harry Warner, translated into an electromagnetic signal through the cathode ray of a television. Sebastián Mira in (U + 1F6A7) establishes a horizon from the digital simulation of the landscape, space and everything that temporarily occupies, looking at virtual ruins as objects that remain in a medium without materiality. These ideas question construction as a badge of progress and modernity; the architectural render, on the other hand, presents the idea of comfort and safety; both synonyms of a well-being that is about to arrive.

This windy love by Ana María Millán was developed with participants in Rotterdam reflecting on the musical movement of the eighties Gabber records in the suburbs of the popular classes with references to the videos of Tanja Nijmeijer with the FARC and the history of a Colombian comic book of a drug dealer. Garden Exercises (Haptic / Visual Identities) by Cristian Villavicencio and Agata Mergler is a project that investigates the concept of ‘digital visuality’ through an unconventional filming system. The recording process derives in a collaborative, relational and haptic system. This way of filming can be seen as a ‘minor art’ practice, in which tools, materials, action and its effects are an attempt of subversive gesture in our digital daily life.

The apparitions section presents a program with works that are broadcast live. In Streaming of a still life in a studio Luuk Schroder performs with a mirror while Hyeisoo Kim improvises in real time with graphics and text. From an overlapping visuality, an intimacy is generated with the eye that looks and the one that edits, multiplying the perspective and playing with the reflection and the surface. In that same timeline, Lover’s blindness by Lea Collet presents a digital ritual of isolated friends in a space. The group ritualizes readings on the iPhone through slow movements and synchrony to enter a ceremonial trance in ‘real time’ highlighting the connection, the difficult and complex relationship of the individual with technological means, which allows new modes of joint affective life.
Open from the inside: Bodies and Sexualities
(co-curated by Angélica María Zorrilla y María Angélica Madero)
Galería Cafám
Bogotá


To doubt the body—that body, my body— and the relationships established in / by / with / through / among others—all of us, other bodies. A selection of subjectivities that have sought to be built upon returning to anatomy, the practices of sexuality, the operations that have historically occurred as natural in the exercise of love, as well as the diversities that alter and resist questioning and feeling, being and knowledge, the representation of gender, the bond with the mother; places that are visited over and over again, territories and narratives that are built over and over again as a consequence and first cause of the search for an understanding or at least the impulse necessary to continue being. Works that have bravely surrendered to the gaze of others after delving into themselves. A sample that challenges us in the first person from the artist's position, and from experience itself.

Things presented to the mind



Artists: Rafa Prada, Hyeisoo Kim and Juan Pablo Plazas Conversation with: Maïte Marciano
Againagainagainagain, 2014

‘Thing presented to the mind’ is the definition of the etymological meaning of the word object. This suggests that for a thing to be an object it must have a connection with the mind; in other words, it has to be presented. As the object is recognised, it therefore implies a relationship between presence and thinking—thinking as identification, interpretation and translation. We could call this relationship sculptural, since it establishes associations of thought and appearance: thinking trough appearance or appearance through thinking. That is, as though sculpture and philosophy were interchangeable concepts. As such, our philosophical/sculptural relationship with objects can be regarded as both material and sculptural insofar as it establishes a form of dialogue. This conversation regards spatial and mental conditions—both horizontal—, which come from more than one direction and have the potential to produce, or rather modify, our ‘vertical’ relationship with objects. ‘Things presented to the mind’ is about redefining the process of utility in a specific space and situation in a bid to locate where the action of the work begins, and ultimately to discover the sculptural possibilities of language.

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