Los Carpinteros Arrive in Bogotá

Beginning on October 26, the exhibition titled "The Thing is Candela" by Cuban artistic duo Los Carpinteros will be on display at the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia of the Banco de la República and, beginning on October 28, the exhibition titled "Los Carpinteros: Towards an Expanded Reading" will be shown at NC-arte. Curated by Andrea Pacheco, "The Thing is Candela" at the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU) is one of the major retrospectives of Los Carpinteros so far and their first grand solo show in Colombia. With more than thirty works, the exhibition will offer the entire formal and conceptual spectrum of their artistic production. The show proposes an exploration of the works by Los Carpinteros from a semiotic perspective while seeking to convey their entire production as an ambivalent, contradictory, paradoxical, and yet greatly subversive, system of signs. Humor in their work is a strategy. Curated by Andrea Pacheco and Claudia Segura, the exhibition "Los Carpinteros: Towards and Expanded Reading" will contain a central architectural piece created in situ especially for this project. It represents the eight version of the work Sala de Lectura (Reading Room), and it will propose opening and expanding the concept of reading towards territories, or rather, towards those new and heterogeneous languages so often dismissed by the logical and rational thinking structure that is predominant in Western or "westernized" cultures. This central piece is accompanied by several watercolors in various formats of assorted panoptic structures. The exhibition project is activated through a Mediation Program that challenges the conventional understanding of what reading is and that offers visitors the opportunity to take part in the open sessions about the different languages within the field of expanded knowledge. Los Carpinteros is a group founded in 1991 in Havana, Cuba. It is currently formed by Marco Antonio Castillo-Valdés (Camagüey, Cuba, 1971) and Dagoberto Rodríguez-Sánchez (Caibarién, Cuba, 1969). Their work has focused on the architectural space and the functionality of the objects created by mankind. With humor and a high degree of technical sophistication, the artistic duo addresses social issues inherent to Latin American contexts. During the last decade, Los Carpinteros have presented their work at the Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Caixa Forum (Barcelona, Spain), Kunstverein (Hannover, Germany), Musée Ariana (Geneva), Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdansk, Poland), Musée d´art Contemporain (Nîmes, France), 4th Thessaloniki Biennale, Museo Centro Gaiás (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Bronx Museum (New York), MUAC (Mexico City), among many other major biennials and fairs. One of the events that will be presented in the context of the exhibitions is a talk with the two artists and curator Andrea Pacheco in the auditorium of the MAMU on October 26 at 4:30 pm.