TE DE BOGOTA
A group show curated by Jorge Sanguino
Fernando Barrera, Karen Paulina Biswell, Felipe Castelblanco, Beatriz Eugenia Diaz Bejarano, Simon Hernandez feat. Simon Mejia (Bomba Estereo), Erwin + Lorena Kraus, Juan Mayr
Exhibition: March 14th – August 22nd, 2020
Part of DC Open
Te de Bogota (in Sp.Té de Bogotá) is an exhibition conceived around artistic positions, that deal with the Colombian nature. It explores the use of photography, video and film as a medium to document a complex relation: Colombian nature’s richness and beauty and its unstoppable destruction. Its title “Té De Bogotá“, a magnificent tea discovered during the botanical expedition of the 18th century, but lately forgotten, proposes that this relation with nature has been historically traceable, and subsumed under a term: exploitation.
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The exhibition reveals how Colombian artists are engaged in social practices with communities living in the different regions. Empowering inhabitants, Afrocolombians, natives, peasants, and women to become producers of their own cultural narratives and administrators of their own resources.
Colombian artists are shaping reality, at the same time they are documenting it, shifting the artistic production from the production of an (aesthetic) form towards a production of (social) knowledge, that occurs at the sea level of the caribbean, or up to the 5,000 meters of the nevados, as well as in the humid, beautiful jungle or in the Páramos.
Essay
A comprehensive essay about the exhibition can be downloaded at academia.edu: Spanish version / German version
Felipe Castelblanco
Felipe Castelblanco
travels along the Putumayo river, develops documentary workshops with their habitants, and with beautiful images – and very rare captures – he documents the breathtaking magic as well as the tension for resources in this rich area.
work: Cartographies of the Unseen. Film still + collage of “RIO”. 2018. 100 x 100cm. Injekt print on fabric. Ed. 5 + 2AP. 1,500€ excl. tax. Felipe Castelblanco.
Fernando Barrera
Fernando Barrera transformed the colombian nature in a large photographic studio. He had captured the fallen trees and branches, and converted them into monumental cyanotipes. work: Flora Girardotensis #4: Rhapis excelsa, Areca catechu, Epipremnum aureum, Bismarckia nobilis, 300m.s.n.m., 4° 18′ 13′′ N, 74° 48′ 14′′ W. 2018. 160 x 240cm. Cyanotype on canvas. Unique. Fernando Barrera
Simon Hernandez
Simon Hernandez, prize winning documentary maker, researches together with Simon Mejia (Bomba Estereo) the inception of the Cumbia rhythm in San Basilio, and gave the community the tools to record their oral tradition, that it is considered world cultural patrimony. Later embodied in magnificent images, Hernandez pays tribute to the vernacular poetry of a peasant as resistance against a mine company.
Watch on Vimeo: Ayayay (feat. Carlos Mendez) · La Voz De La Tierra
Erwin & Lorena Kraus
Té De Bogotá, shows for the first time in Europe, the historic photographs of the Colombian glaciers by Erwin Kraus. He captured the sublimity of the mountain, and its beauty, contemporary transformed through his grandaughter’s artistic archival practice, Lorena Kraus, into a lively document of memories and the scientific documention of the melting.
Juan Mayr
Juan Mayr has been documenting the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and its indigenous tribes, the Kogis, since the 80s. His photography and political work protected this unique ecosystem, and allowed the Kogis to recuperate their land, gaining access to the sea. He was appointed environmental minister and works as a researcher.
work: 1983. Dia. 12,7 x 18 cm. Unique. 800€ excl. tax. Juan Myar.
Beatriz Eugenia Diaz
Beatriz Eugenia Diaz, the pioneer of sound art in Colombia, composer and visual artist, unveiled the relation between music and text around the last Té de Bogotá tree in the Colombian capital, a silent witness of the urbanization and violence.
work: Installation (7 Photographies + Audio 23:45 min. Double Channel, each 12 x25,5cm). 2019. Ed. 4/7. On request. Beatriz Eugenia Diaz.
To listen the sound piece CLICK HERE Listen to the sound piece
Karen Paulina Biswell
Colombian born, raised in France, Karen Paulina Biswell presents strong and decisive women’s portrait series of the Embera Chamí – Colombian native community. She has been close to a family who had to flee to Bogota dodging violence. Intelligently delicate, she shows the strong relation between the community and their natural environment, asking herself about her own identity, as she has fled the country in her childhood. Jagua. 2014. 80 x 80cm. Analog C Type hand print Kodak Endura Paper by Diamantino Quintas. Laminated on 2mm Alu plate.
In cooperation with EIKON and the Institut Français Düsseldorf
Exhibition Views
Te de Bogota, curated by Jorge Sanguino.
