James Fuentes is pleased to present Swimming in Rivers of Glue (an exercise in counterintuitive empathy), an exhibition by Julieta Aranda.
9H – BINDING
The architecture, the artifacts, the traffic, the way in which the keepers of the law and the subjects of the law behave towards each other.
1V – PRODUCED
A point of reference slowly draws in semantic meaning to provide the world with a fixed border, fixed dimensions, fixed weight.
12H – HYBRID
Things that exist but pretend not to.
3V – POSSIBILITY
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.
19H – DAMAGING
Attention! Danger ! It’s a trick, an ambush ! Fight ! Bite ! Parry ! Thrust !
10V – INNACURATE
Pursuit of efficiency.
25H – EMPTY
Everybody ready to believe anything
18V – DISTORTED
To be able to move in only one plane and along one line
32H – EXISTENCE
Passing through, being marked and to some extent damaged by the geography of the present.
27V – DREAM
A monstrously optimistic fantasy: That man can crawl out from the web of blind necessity through his understanding of self and others.
36H – REPOSITORY
Mazes, paradoxes, puzzles, passwords, pathwork, names, significant identity, gene patterns, investment portfolios.
30V – STANDARD MODEL
In their nature as socially produced and negotiated abstractions (all identities fail).
43H – EVENHANDED
We are terribly sorry folks, but everyone alive is involved in this experiment now.
48V – MATERIALITY
Forced to play the hand that history has dealt us.
51H – DRIVE
In ten seconds, how many synonyms can you think of for the word “power”?
Swimming in Rivers of Glue looks at the mechanisms of hostile / defensive architecture, and the effects its deployment has in the constitution and use of public space.
Julieta Aranda’s work spans sculpture, installation, video, and print media. Her complex body of work exists outside the boundaries of the object, and is characterized by the struggle of catching sight of elusive concepts such as time, circulation, and imagination. Aranda’s installations and temporary projects, which often examine social interactions and the role that the circulation of objects plays in the cycles of production and consumption, are intensely site-specific. Much of her work takes up the concept of time, sometimes to consider alternative notions of the temporal experience, and other times to approach the arbitrariness of time and freedom from time.
As a co-director of the online platform e-flux together with Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda has developed the projects Time/Bank, Pawnshop, and e-flux video rental, all of which started in the e-flux storefront in New
York, and have travelled to many venues worldwide. Arandas work has been exhibited internationally, in venues such as the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Guggenheim Museum (2015, 2009), Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2015), 8th Berlin Biennale (2014), Berardo Museum, Lisbon (2014), Witte de With (2013 and 2010), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genova (2013), MACRO Roma (2012) Documenta 13 (2012), N.B.K. (2012), Gwangju Biennial (2012), 54th Venice Biennial (2011), Istanbul Biennial (2011), Portikus, Frankfurt (2011), New Museum NY (2010), Kunstverein Arnsberg (2010), MOCA Miami (2009), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007), 2nd Moscow Biennial (2007) MUSAC, Spain (2010 and 2006), and VII Havanna Biennial; amongst many others .
