The talk by Paz Guevara will explore Burga’s manifold experimental works. Burga, whose ‘non-works’ have played away from the notion of the single author, expanding sculpture, participation and generative structures, will be situated in the larger context of further Latin American artists and the heated art historical debates of the cold war that continue to trouble contemporary art.
Teresa Burga’s process of ‘non-work’ has been key to her practice since the 1960s until today. Confrontational and self-critic, Burga has escaped from traditional taste and the limits of a style. Instead of oil, Tekno latex paint for walls was her first ‘palette’, and when pop art was spreading like a forest-fire, Burga twisted it into critical pop environments embodying a feminist critique. Later, turning away from the object, Burga advanced artistic research traversing conceptual practice with the languages of semiotics, information, cybernetics, social studies and quantum physics. A remarkable artist, curiously in the oblivion for decades until recent exhibitions shed light into her oeuvre.
Paz Guevara is a curator, researcher and author based in Berlin. Currently, she is collaborating in the long-term project Kanon-Fragen at Haus der Kulturen der Welt - HKW in Berlin, Germany. In this context, she has been co-curator of the exhibition Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017-2018. Guevara has been co-curator of the Latin American Pavilion at the 55th and 54th Venice Biennial (2013 and 2011), the Montevideo Biennial in Uruguay (2013), the Curitiba Biennial in Brazil (2011) and In Other Words: The Black Market of Translations - Negotiating Contemporary Cultures at NGBK in Berlin (2012), among others. She has conducted several workshops and seminars on curating and art history, including the Berlin Biennale (2012), the Heidelberg University (2015-2016) and the IED Instituto Europe di Design in Venice (2017). She has written extensively on contemporary artists. Most recently, on the work of Beatriz Gonzalez and Olaf Holzapfel for Documenta 14, and on Sandra Vázquez de la Horra for The Bottom Line exhibition's catalogue of S.M.A.K.
Practical information
- Sunday 13 May 2018
- S.M.A.K. auditorium
- 11 am
- English spoken
- Entry: museum ticket
