ANA ALENSO

The Nominees

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Berlin Art Prize

  July 20. Ana Alenso: green and yellow/ boom and bust

green and yellow
boom and bust

Friday, July 20, 19:00-21:00

Ana Alenso builds an allegorical cosmos showcasing the economic, social and ecological risks and disequilibria implicit in natural-resource extractive industries, with a particular focus on those pertaining to hydrocarbons. During the cultivation phase of TIER.space, she will create a sculptural intervention that combines plants, water and industrial elements. Objects such as an oil barrel and glass water bottles—familiar shell-like traces of destructive global consumerist traffic—are brought in conversation with living plants. Light, heat, growth, moisture, will transform the sculpture over the course of the following months.

The opening of this project will be accompanied by an installation of works: La enfermedad holandesa tropical and The future of oil, both of which are related to the speculative and metaphorical contents found within certain political economy phenomena, most specifically those associated with boom-and-bust cycles, the Dutch disease and the resource curse. Such phenomena occur predominantly in natural-resource-rich nations where corruption and violence become commonplace, paving the way for authoritarian regimes to rise to power. An example of this paradox manifests itself within the artist’s native country, Venezuela, which has the world’s second largest oil reserve, and yet is submerged in one of the worst humanitarian and economic crises of recent history.

‘The One Who Teeters on The Brink Of Disaster’

curated by Eli Cortiñas, a Spanish video artist based in Berlin

In Homi K. Bhabha’s famous essay “The Commitment to Theory” culture emerges as a problem at the point at which there is a loss of meaning in the articulation of everyday’s life, between classes, genders, races, nations. The intervention of the Third Space of Enunciation as he describes it, destroys the mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open and expanding code. It is exactly in this space that video artist Eli Cortiñas situates the group of international artists presented in this program. An urgent search of extravagant and exuberant mysteries, an autonomous staging of possible violent scenarios, tropical economic values, stripteases of one’s own soul, lost of commodities and the fall of ideal projects of long gone futures go hand in hand to establish an unknown space, a new order between signifier and signified.   

selected films:

how does the world breathe now?

FILM SERIES

Session N°34: Oil Files presented by Ana Alenso

September 6, 2017 | 7 PM

SAVVY Contemporary | Plantagenstraße 31 | 13347 Berlin

For our 34th screening Ana Alenso presents Oil Files, a compilation of 7 video-art works of Venezuelan artists from 1968 to 2016. The selection focuses on the relationship between oil production and Venezuelan culture, especially as it relates to structural problems of social inequality and corruption, seeking to give the audience insight into Venezuela’s contemporary history and its current deep-scale crisis.

Part I

Pozo Muerto (1968) by Carlos Rebolledo.

Part II

BLACK GOLD FIRE (2015) by Rolando Peña.

Tropical curse (2015) by Ana Alenso.

Prototipo de vivienda en país petrolero (2004) by Alexander Apóstol

Panorama Miraflores (2014) by Iván Candeo.

The dogs keep barking (2016) by Erika Ordosgoitti.

Reconversión (2008) by Marco Montiel-Soto.

The event will conclude with an open discussion with the Venezuelan artists Ana Alenso and Marco Montiel-Soto, the Doctor in Latin American Studies Manuel Silva Ferrer, and writer Alberto Morreo.

First, we will show the short film Pozo Muerto (1968, 30’ min. long), directed by Carlos Rebolledo, and produced in collaboration with the Venezuelan avant-garde literary and artistic group El Techo de La Ballena. This raw narrative, or “crude history”, of three residents of a town transformed by the discovery of an oil well in 1922 is set amidst black and white landscapes. It presents the drama of a population abandoned in the ruins of a recent past, a period once described as a bonanza, when foreign oil companies promised prosperous economic futures.

The second part (40 min. long) brings together the work of six contemporary artists. The video Black Gold Fire (2015) by Rolando Peña, otherwise well known as The Black Prince, zooms out a focus on Venezuela and recognizes Oil in its most universal sense, as an object of scientific inquiry and a symbol of wealth and power. Ana Alenso’s Tropical Curse (2015) presents a collage of found and archive images, where social and political economical phenomena juxtapose the brutal fact that the world’s largest oil reserves exist alongside the highest rates of murder and poverty.

Prototipo de vivienda en país petrolero (2004), by Alexander Apóstol, follows. A plaza in the city center has a monument dedicated in 1975 to Oil, the year of the nationalization of Venezuelan oil. By the year 2004 it had become a shelter for the homeless, where peasants and beggars build their “rancho”, shelters under the rocker of the oil’s monument. Oil and slums, gather here to be represented under the same monument.

The political repression and persecution to diverse sectors who oppose the government has been brutal, with over more than 600 political prisoners and more than 120 people killed in these last four months during protests. The abuse of force has been documented and has gained international visibility surpassing different media state control and censorship.

In the current social and political crisis, the video Panorama de Miraflores (2014) by Iván Candeo commands us to observe vigilantly the building belonging to the Presidential Guard of the Miraflores Palace, where a certain ‘tense calm’ reigns mixed with state paranoia, and a general uncertainty typical of the events surrounding a state coup.

Venezuela has recently registered the highest record of inflation of not only its own economic history but of the entire region. Marco Montiel Soto’s Reconversion (2008) and Erika Ordoisgoitti’s The dogs keep barking (2016) confront us with the financial terrain of the crisis, approaching money directly. Each artist manipulates the material trappings of value, interrogating the increase of inflation, the symbolic violence inherent to it, and its impact on the collective body.

LINK: http://savvy-contemporary.com/index.php/projects/filmseriespast/

Money Laundering

Albano Afonso, Ana Alenso, Lehman Brothers,
Alejandro Gómez Arias, Kristian Touborg,
and Andrés Vial

Curated by Rodolfo Andaur

16 June - 8 July, 2017

Gothersgade 167, st.th. Wednesday-Friday 11-18, Saturday 13-17

http://www.sixtyeight.dk

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