Espacio Minimo Gallery Presents Mexican Artist Joaquin Segura’s First Solo Show in Spain

Espacio Minimois slated to present Mexican artist JOAQUIN SEGURA’s first solo show in Spain, February 1^st – March 29^th. Mexican curator Mariana Davidcommented on the group of works that make up this project, Exception State (Estado de excepción):

The global scene makes citizens be worried about the economic policies that are always restricting civil rights as they devastate life on the planet. Images of shootings and bombings on the news get interweaved with endless advertising spots that encourage you to buy a car or some yogurt. When you walk around cities that have been affected by the unemployment phenomenon, just like Madrid, you wonder: where do the people get the money to keep on spending? It happens in Spain, Mexico or Jakarta, the crisis not only affects one country, but all of them. Each nation’s problems are intrinsically linked to the interests of the hegemonic power that knows no bounds. That’s the reason why Joaquin Segura feels nostalgia when he talks about national identity and refers to the conceptof post-nation as a “branding” that can be used to create a false idea of integration.

Interested in the nature of power, especially in the emergence and fall of political and ideological apparatus, his work goes deep into the fissures and contradictions that have precisely taken those structures down. But instead recognizing or extoling the subversion, Segura’s work makes viewers face their own ghosts. He presents the paradox that everything can be denied, destroyed or deleted. From the Czech dissidence during the soviet era to the existence of Frente Popular Farabundo Martiin El Salvador, the artist reproduces documents on these movements and upon doing so, he turns them into artworks. The political content gets diluted in objects of surplus value. An actof provocation? It depends on where the viewer stands.

Segura uses micro-stories to support what he calls “the triumph of failure”, what can be translated as the fall of every ideology that turns it back to reality, on one side, and every revolutionary act in the political sphere, on the other hand. In “Material Study on the Uprising #1” (2014), the objects used as projectiles in rally sceneries in Mexico City are photographed as an ethnographic catalogue. The result recalls the historic fetish value acquired by these artifacts, as well as the overwhelming unavoidability of the hegemonic power that makes us question the effectiveness of street demonstrations.

The resource of translation and the loss of sense becomes evident in “The Anarchists and the Bombs” (2013), a video that shows a woman interpreting –in sign language – a text published on the anarchist gazette “Tierra y Libertad”, 1907. The formatgenerates a distancing between the content and the audience, where anarchist-syndicalist slogans are reduced to gestures in a monitor.

Segura asserts that with work “stands from the distance and assesses things from the outside”, but his interest in collecting symbols and moments of political history has always carried an implication, even if it is the simple fact of rescuing episodes that have gone lost in the annals of History.

This series of works that make up the show, some of which have been created since 2011 and others were produced for this event, deliver a mind panorama of sense of unease that, in the best scenario, will help us find routes to run away from this state of permanent exception.

JOAQUIN SEGURA (Mexico City, 1980)lives and works in Mexico, DF. His work is developed in such platforms as the installation, photography, action or video and it has been displayed in solo and collective exhibitions in Mexico, United States, Europe and Asia, in spaces like Siqueiros public Art Hall, Carrillo Gil Museum of Art, La Panaderia, Tamayo Museumof Contemporary Art in Mexico, as well as El Museo del Barrio, Anthology Film Archives, White Box and Apexart (New York), LA><ART, MoLAA (Los Angeles), Reina Sofia National MuseumArt Center (Madrid), National Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow) and the Museumof Modern Art in Fort Worth, TX. His work has been widely reviewed and included on local and international specialized publications. In 2008/09, Segura stayed at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York, NY and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is a founder member of the council of SOMA, Mexico, DF.