Mario García Torres, An Arrival Tale

Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment, repetition, and reportage are some of the strategies that the Mexican artist Mario García Torres (born 1975 in Monclova, Mexico) deploys to uncover (hidden) histories, narratives, and strategies embedded in sites and places and thereby to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the subjectivity of historical records and objects. An Arrival Tale, an exhibition at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) Augarten, uses a conceptual gesture that detaches the works by the artist in the TBA21 collection from their original contexts and descriptions and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments open for reinscription. García Torres states, "An Arrival Tale is an exhibition that pretends to use a number of my works from the TBA21 collection to argue that the space of arrival, the space where one can reinvent oneself, could be an interesting one, and one that has historically been a space to thrive." An Arrival Tale, will be in view until November 20, 2016. Curate by Daniela Zyman and Cory Scozzari as assistant curator, the show was conceived in light of TBA21's engagements with the contemporary refugee crisis and, more generally, within the condition of continuous global migration and displacement. The exhibition seeks to collect, describe, and complicate narratives of transplantation, pointing to migrations, displacements, relocations, and resettlements, which span both time and disparate geographies.