SBC Gallery | North-South Dialogues

The contemporary art gallery SBC presents, at the Belgo, the fruits of a collaboration with the Mexican museum Ex Teresa Arte Actual, specialized in performance, video and multimedia. With 18 videos, Chronicles: resonances deals with the challenges that affect Mexico and Latin America in general. But also the countries of the North.

Eric Clement
The Press

While Ukrainian artists have had to abandon brushes and lenses to defend their country and the world of Russian art is opposed (overwhelmingly) to the war decided by Vladimir Putin, here is an audiovisual exhibition that brings us, in a little over two hours, to see that the main expectations of the citizens of the world are ultimately always the same: to live in peace and in a democratic system that guarantees, at the very least, a certain social justice.

The exhibition conveys these aspirations by touching on themes that often recur in Central and South American news – hence these Chroniclesin the sense of chronicity – such as the legacy of colonialism, chronic violence (disappearances, kidnappings and murders), patriarchy, social inequalities, gender discrimination, lack of education and racism.

With The great return, by the Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo, we embrace all these themes with this marching band that plays martial music… going backwards instead of forwards in a street in Guatemala City. Turn your back on progress while remaining rooted in the past.

One of the most interesting segments of the exhibition evokes the questioning of statues of historical figures whose ideas or actions today appear obsolete, if not criminal.

A boomerang return observed in Great Britain and North America, but also in Mexico and France.

Cuenda, by Mexican Laura Valencia Lazada, shows a performance made in 2011 on Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City, to honor the thousands of missing people in that country. To give them visibility, the artists camouflaged the 14 statues located on this artery with black cotton thread.

The curators of the Mexican museum have also chosen a film by Colombian artist Iván Argote. He lives in Europe and was interested in the statue of the former French colonial administrator Joseph Gallieni (1849-1916) located on Place Vauban, in Paris.

The film Goodbye Joseph Gallieni is the documentation of a “fake” intervention organized by the French political scientist and feminist activist Françoise Vergès. We believe we see the unbolting of the statue of Galliemi, but it is a montage to make the population and the town hall react to the proposal to no longer honor this soldier who valued forced labor and the “separation of races” .

Issues of cultural heritage and the right to housing are examined in Heritage weighs, of the Mexican Perla Ramos who we see dragging noisily, in the streets of Quito, in Ecuador, a crate containing a cobblestone of the historic city center. A performance on the current weight of heritage in our lives. A theme at the heart of two other films on the sense of community, memory and attachment to the ground, Mount of Enchantment; Chichon Volcanoby Tania Ximena and Yollotl Alvarado, and Essays on Reconstruction (José Martí)by Joaquin Segura.

The importance of cultural education for children is discussed in GuggenSITO, a video by Mexican Eder Castillo, in which a citizen, delighted to see his child playing in an inflatable carousel resembling the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, adds that a museum in his village would not harm. Poetry occupies a prominent place in Hollowmana work on the identity of Ilián González, where nature and urbanity are contrasted.

Ex Teresa Arte Actual’s selection includes An Invisible Minority (2018), the film by Quebecer Stanley Juillet, which deals with the discrimination that non-white artists have long suffered in institutionalized art spaces in Quebec. Stanley February, who had his first museum solo last year, at 45, wants more diversity in museums. A desire partly satisfied since he shot this film in which he and the artists Michaëlle Sergile and Aimé Mbuyi play the role… of guardians of a museum that resembles the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Machismo is also vilified with a mixture of humor and seriousness in intellectual machoa film by the Mexican feminist-queer group INVASORIX which illustrates, in song, the difference between good feelings and actions.

Antigone, ritual diary N.4: at the end, the beginning also deserves a mention. Venezuelan artist Livia Daza-Paris pays tribute to the memory of her father, Iván Daza, who died in 1966, at a time when the right-wing Venezuelan regime was marked by the disappearance and assassinations of left-wing leaders. In the film, she sets off with her daughter on the paths of the region where her father disappeared…

Finally, still on the theme of disappearances, what a beautiful and moving performance in Toronto by Mexican artist Roberto de la Torre! To pay tribute to the 43 Mexican students who disappeared in 2014 in Iguala, he involved art lovers in an action that consisted of making holes outside with shovels and trowels. Without regard to landscaping and public spaces (kindergarten) to also criticize the cavalier attitude of some Canadian mining companies in southern countries…

Note that on the occasion of International Women’s Day, several artists from this exhibition will participate, on March 8 at 9 p.m., in a virtual discussion (in Spanish) on their work. And on March 24, at 6:30 p.m., a 60-minute film by Ecuadorian artist Fabiano Kueva evoking the journey of German scientist Alexander Von Humboldt between 1799 and 1802, will be shown (in Spanish, subtitles in French) at the Cinéma public, 505, rue Jean-Talon Est, in Montreal.