Sebastian Diaz Morales
Talk with Dust
14 Mar - 18 Apr 2020
SEBASTIAN DIAZ MORALES
Talk with Dust
14 March – 18 April 2020
“This fantastic is not the one that interrupts the ordinary course of things but rather that which is at once strange and present, at the same time its contradiction and its confirmation.” - Clement Rosset, El Objeto Singular
carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce the exhibition of a recent video installation by the Argentinian artist Sebastian Diaz Morales. Talk with Dust will be his seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. Diaz Morales’ work draws upon the traditions of South American avant-garde cinema, narrative film, and documentary practice to create films and video installations. Through fragmented, abstract scenarios, the artist articulates elastic conceptions of time and space that mine the borderline between reality and fiction.
The philosopher Michael Marder describes dust as an element that transgresses the boundaries between temporal modalities, residing in a non-linear, non-sequential time that collapses the “babel” of past, present, and future. “Eternity is time configured as space, or space indistinguishable from time,” he writes, “and dust is its swirling, rolling, disintegrating, and conglomerating image.” In Talk with Dust, Diaz Morales once again returns to the harsh, arid Patagonian landscape that has significantly shaped his artistic language. Spreading across six-channels displayed in two rooms of the gallery, Talk with Dust opens with a vertical projection of road shot from a moving vehicle. With the camera focused entirely on the asphalt, we don’t see any of the surrounding landscape, and with its whirring yellow lines and patchy zig-zags of tar, this view of Patagonia’s route 26 dissolves into something that resembles a Structuralist film more than a scenic drive— thereby setting the tone for a journey without a clear destination. Over the video’s six channels, which unfold over screens of different sizes and orientation, we encounter a slow-burning candle, a drummer improvising, an explosion, and a car cycling endlessly in the desert. Through the viewers’ own movement through space, these isolated occurrences form their own asynchronic narrative and generate a fragmented world—rich mental and material territories on “the other side of the real” where the fantastic resides.
Sebastian Diaz Morales (b.1975, Comodoro Rivadavia) lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2009 he was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship. Diaz Morales has exhibited in venues such as STUK Museum, Leuven, Belgium; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Siegen; Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing; CAC Vilnius, Vilnius; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Art in General, New York; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; De Appel, Amsterdam; Bienale São Paulo; Biennale of Sydney; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. He participated in the 57th Venice Biennale curated by Christine Macel.He is included in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Fundación Jumex, Mexico City; Foundazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museu Berardo, Lisbon.
Talk with Dust
14 March – 18 April 2020
“This fantastic is not the one that interrupts the ordinary course of things but rather that which is at once strange and present, at the same time its contradiction and its confirmation.” - Clement Rosset, El Objeto Singular
carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce the exhibition of a recent video installation by the Argentinian artist Sebastian Diaz Morales. Talk with Dust will be his seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. Diaz Morales’ work draws upon the traditions of South American avant-garde cinema, narrative film, and documentary practice to create films and video installations. Through fragmented, abstract scenarios, the artist articulates elastic conceptions of time and space that mine the borderline between reality and fiction.
The philosopher Michael Marder describes dust as an element that transgresses the boundaries between temporal modalities, residing in a non-linear, non-sequential time that collapses the “babel” of past, present, and future. “Eternity is time configured as space, or space indistinguishable from time,” he writes, “and dust is its swirling, rolling, disintegrating, and conglomerating image.” In Talk with Dust, Diaz Morales once again returns to the harsh, arid Patagonian landscape that has significantly shaped his artistic language. Spreading across six-channels displayed in two rooms of the gallery, Talk with Dust opens with a vertical projection of road shot from a moving vehicle. With the camera focused entirely on the asphalt, we don’t see any of the surrounding landscape, and with its whirring yellow lines and patchy zig-zags of tar, this view of Patagonia’s route 26 dissolves into something that resembles a Structuralist film more than a scenic drive— thereby setting the tone for a journey without a clear destination. Over the video’s six channels, which unfold over screens of different sizes and orientation, we encounter a slow-burning candle, a drummer improvising, an explosion, and a car cycling endlessly in the desert. Through the viewers’ own movement through space, these isolated occurrences form their own asynchronic narrative and generate a fragmented world—rich mental and material territories on “the other side of the real” where the fantastic resides.
Sebastian Diaz Morales (b.1975, Comodoro Rivadavia) lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2009 he was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship. Diaz Morales has exhibited in venues such as STUK Museum, Leuven, Belgium; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Siegen; Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing; CAC Vilnius, Vilnius; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Art in General, New York; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; De Appel, Amsterdam; Bienale São Paulo; Biennale of Sydney; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. He participated in the 57th Venice Biennale curated by Christine Macel.He is included in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Fundación Jumex, Mexico City; Foundazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museu Berardo, Lisbon.