Tales from a THIRD SPACE: versa
“Desterritorialización del Poder”

TALES FROM A THIRD SPACE is an intercultural dialogue between the project spaces El Palmar (Mexico City) and Axel Obiger - space for contemporary art (Berlin), intending to enable artists of both places to meet at eye level in a non-commercial environment; to introduce production and living conditions on site and to gain insights into art and culture-related differences, perspectives, and perceptions.

The project`s main idea is based on the theory of the so-called “Third Space” by theorist Homi K. Bhabha, meaning that exchange creates a common ideal place in which new content can be developed collaboratively without any hierarchical structure. This place is as dynamic as it is changeable and limited in time.

TALES FROM A THIRD SPACE is divided into Chapters; It all starts with Chapter1: vice, which was combining a 14-day artist residency of six members of Axel Obiger with a presentation and an artist talk at El Palmar Gallery. Chapter1: vice, introduced the Berlin based artists into the local art scene of Mexico City.

Chapter2: versa, “Desterritorialización del Poder”,  aims to create a critical narrative of the territory through artistic pieces that individually show sites of atomized power. It builds a narrative that reveals a society beyond what it imagines of itself, acknowledging its own precarious understandings of gender, race and class relations and their complicity and involvement (conscious or unconscious) on some questionable power dynamics that unfold everywhere.

In Chapter2: versa, individual stories (TALES) will be traveling from Mexico, across the Atlantic, while some are permanently situated in Europe, the dialog between them will also become a cross point  in order to draw a direct link to Berlin as a city of immigration with its countless memories and power histories, they are all including their individual narratives and projections connected to Mexico and else where, not only to the power dynamic of a space of a territory but to its relationship to associate to time and its limits to the medium as actual. The show at Axel Obiger Gallery in Berlin will be containing these imported narratives and memories in order to bring all aspects together, both historical and fictional.

Chapter2: versa,  will feature works by Mexican Artists: Arturo Hernández Alcázar, Katya Gardea Browne, Sandra Contreras, Miguel Ángel Cordera, Alejandro Moncada, Arturo Ortíz Struck, Alejandro Mondría.  

 

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Arturo Hernández Alcázar
Born in Mexico City, 1978. Since 1996 he has participated in exhibitions in museums, collections, galle- ries and independent spaces in Mexico, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the United States.

Katya Gardea Browne
MFA, Yale University, studied Fine Art at School of Visual Arts in New York as well as La Esmeralda, Na- tional Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Has exhibited in Mexico, Europe, the US and South America, including Video Film Festival, Garzoni, Venice Italy, KINDL Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Bayer Foundation & the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand. Lives and works in Mexico City.

Sandra Contreras
Born in Mexico City 1974. Since 2001 has lived and worked between Berlin and Mexico City. She comple- ted an M.A. in Art Studies at the UIA in Mexico and an M.A. in Art in Context in Berlin, UdK.
Her artistic practice is situated in the emerging field of contemporary textile work.

Miguel Ángel Cordera
Visual artist with studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana, the Escuela Nacional de ArtesPlásticas and residencies at the Rhode Island School of Design. It has a history of more than 30 years carrying out projects in different countries such as France, Germany, Spain, the United States, Portugal, Canada and Egypt, among others.

 

Alejandro Moncada
Born in Mexico. Studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana and Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, Le Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Art in France. He has exhibited at the Ex Teresa Arte Actual, MUCA Roma, the Museum of Modern Art in Lille, the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow and the ZKM Karlsruhe, among others.

Arturo Ortiz Struck
Visual artist and architect. He was member of the National System of Art Creators (FONCA) between 2007 and 2014 as an architect and as a visual artist, also obtained the BBVA foundation fellowship for art projects (2017). He has taken part in numerous exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture. Arturo published his first novel “My Neurosis Map.

Alejandro Mondría
Born in México city, works and lives in Zurich, Switzerland. Study art at Rhode Island school of design and did his masters in Zürich Hochschule der Künste.

They will all show selected works, part of them being site specific, realized during their stay in Berlin, Germany.

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AXEL OBIGER

Brunnenstr. 29

10119 Berlin Mitte

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Link to exhibition Tales from a THIRD SPACE Chapter1: vice - Mexico City