"Not Me": Subject To Change

2012 CIFO Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition

CIFO Art Space, Miami │ September 15 - November 4, 2012

“Not Me”: Subject to Change. CIFO 2012 Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition is the 9th edition of the Foundation’s program which supports emerging and mid-career contemporary artists from Latin America. It features newly commissioned works by Eduardo Abaroa, Francisca Aninat, Julieta Aranda, Tamar Guimarães, Glexis Novoa, Daniela Ortiz, Marta María Perez Bravo and Marisa Rubio. The sculptures, installations, drawings, performances and videos included in “Not Me”: Subject to Change all allude to the body in a range of ways: From the subtle to the overt, signaled to commanding, violent to intangible.

The title of the exhibition is loosely inspired by Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory of the first “not me possession:” a transitional object that moves the child into his or her first understanding of their body as an independent entity. This shift into self-awareness takes the child from the illusion of supremacy (commanding the fulfillment of its essential needs at will) into a world of shared experiences filled with the successes and disillusions of its quest for dominance over his or her objects of desire.

This transitional object—space or experience—in Winnicott terms, paves the way for understanding and navigating the intermediacy and distance between inner and outer experiences. In the case of the works included in this exhibition, however, the title reflects the way artists convey or invoke the body in their navigation through an increasingly complex contemporary existence: one replete with rapidly changing conditions, boundaries, borders and timelines. Perhaps it is in the sense of navigation that we find Winnicott’s theory an apt departure point when discussing how these works interrelate.

The exhibition oscillates between investigations on the body’s role in shaping objects—as in Abaroa’s sculpture made of an amalgamated selection of tools designed for human hands—to the body’s role in the creation of an idealized spectator as in Novoa’s drawings and performances specifically created for a physically challenged dancer. The body in “Not Me”: Subject to Change then takes on a more performed or staged presence: from Rubio’s invented characters whose performances infiltrate and navigate the real world to Perez Bravo’s video installations where the body is staged to create poetic vignettes and meditations on transience and intangibility. In Guimarães’ installation a film crew’s exhaustive efforts to bring silence to a set are heard but not seen, the shouts are a testament to the faith any collective group may have in realizing something which does not yet exist. 

This notion of collective desire is also at the root of Aranda’s exploration into the infinite monkey theorem which reflects upon the dormant potentiality of narratives in a continuation of her research into forms of circulating information. The politicized body is at the epicenter of the works created by Aninat and Ortiz whose approaches --one which uses fragmentation and reconstruction and the other the power of disclosure --highlight the precariousness of social and political systems past and present.