Contaminated: Hybridization of Languages in Today's Art
Until December 15 the Sala Mendoza presents the exhibition Contaminated. It showcases works by 15 artists from different generations that explore the mixture and hybridization of languages in contemporary art. Under the curatorship of María Elena Ramos, with museography by Rafael Santana and Maitena De Elguezábal, the group exhibition Contaminated explores the combination and hybridization of languages and "delves into concepts like 'impure art,' as opposed to older notions of 'pure art;' works that look beyond the 'purity' involved in the use of a sole and specialized artistic discipline. Here, the contaminated is the opposite of the unpolluted; it represents that which has been incorporated and accepted through the interrelation of the different, even the contagious, the transmitted, the crossed, the grafted—among many other processes and discourses. Thus, purity and impurity, the use of a sole language vs. the combination of several languages—crossbreeding—are central ideas of this project," affirms Ramos.
Magdalena Fernández, Corina Briceño, Mariana Rondón, Anita Pantin, Terry Smith, Javier León, Andrés Michelena, Enay Ferrer, Julio Pacheco, Luis Molina-Pantin, Pedro Morales, Miguel Von Dangel, Alfredo Ramírez, Misael Carpio, and Kruskheylim Jhamaly are the authors that form part of this exhibition project. These fifteen artists belong to several generations, some are prominent masters, others, young artists with works already exhibited in Venezuela and abroad, and others yet are still students in the process of finishing their thesis at the Universidad de las Artes.
Despite the differences between the participants, their works collectively evidence the syncretism that Ramos alludes to: the painter or the sculptor rely on video, the urban context, photography, digital elements, twitter, and other social networks, as they use several format and supports. "We are no longer talking about a sole creator producing his/her work in different moments with different languages; but rather, we now can speak of individual artists who in a single visual proposal are able to merge, fuse, and simultaneously rely on very different mediums. And it is precisely because of this lively and dynamic mixture of mediums that works of this nature are able to exist."
Contaminated answers to the concept of thematic group exhibitions aimed at the exploration of specific aspects of contemporary art.
