Yoshua Okon
22 Feb - 06 Apr 2008
Städtische Kunsthalle München
YOSHUA OKON
Subtitle
22.02.2008 - 06.04.2008
Eröffnung: 21.02.2008
It is 1999, and you turn a corner on the quiet streets of the tree-shaded Condesa neighborhood in Mexico City. You stop in disbelief as you find yourself face to face with two policemen dancing in broad daylight. These officers of the law and public order are dressed in full uniform, with their guns bouncing up and down as they step in rhythm to the tune of a rodeo-style Mexican square dance that blares out of buses and jukeboxes all over the city. As they finish dancing, you notice someone –a young man— has been discreetly shooting a video, and they exchange greetings and some money—for the time spent dancing, one might assume.
It is now 2008, you are in München and you walk into a show with the same dancing policemen projected in a room. There are other videos, some with other policemen doing various things, others include: a mexican hairless dog copulating with a french poodle, a soap-opera shot in a furniture store, a remake of Joseph Beuys coyote performance, and a mockumentary of people walking around their neighborhood as “savages,” amongst others. They are all part of Subtitle: 1997-2007, a video-installation exhibition by Yoshua Okón (b. Mexico City, 1970)
Okón collaborates with non-actors and people he meets on the streets in order to give them a forum to perform their own dreams and fantasies (which might coincide with the viewers worst nightmares). Within this arrangement, the camera becomes a pretext, a mediator, a shield, and a mirror. As a mirror, for example, it reveals the discomfort of our own reflection as viewers and our credible proximity to what transpires, which implicates us in the artist’s many problematic and polemic issues. Thus, Okón’s performances-as-portraits (or portraits-as-performances) reveal not only the ethical risks of art for the artist and his collaborators, but also poses a risk to the viewer’s subjectivity by making us uncomfortably complicit. Okón’s work mirrors our constructed ideas of the world and its inhabitants, our artificially and neatly drawn borders between truth and fiction, reality and artifice, dream and life. In Okón’s work, risk is the twin of uncertainty.
Gabriela Jauregui (from her text “Pull the Trigger!” in The Aesthetics of Risk, ed. by John Welchman. Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2008)
Yoshua Okón ist Stipendiat der Villa Waldberta
www.yoshuaokon.com
YOSHUA OKON
Subtitle
22.02.2008 - 06.04.2008
Eröffnung: 21.02.2008
It is 1999, and you turn a corner on the quiet streets of the tree-shaded Condesa neighborhood in Mexico City. You stop in disbelief as you find yourself face to face with two policemen dancing in broad daylight. These officers of the law and public order are dressed in full uniform, with their guns bouncing up and down as they step in rhythm to the tune of a rodeo-style Mexican square dance that blares out of buses and jukeboxes all over the city. As they finish dancing, you notice someone –a young man— has been discreetly shooting a video, and they exchange greetings and some money—for the time spent dancing, one might assume.
It is now 2008, you are in München and you walk into a show with the same dancing policemen projected in a room. There are other videos, some with other policemen doing various things, others include: a mexican hairless dog copulating with a french poodle, a soap-opera shot in a furniture store, a remake of Joseph Beuys coyote performance, and a mockumentary of people walking around their neighborhood as “savages,” amongst others. They are all part of Subtitle: 1997-2007, a video-installation exhibition by Yoshua Okón (b. Mexico City, 1970)
Okón collaborates with non-actors and people he meets on the streets in order to give them a forum to perform their own dreams and fantasies (which might coincide with the viewers worst nightmares). Within this arrangement, the camera becomes a pretext, a mediator, a shield, and a mirror. As a mirror, for example, it reveals the discomfort of our own reflection as viewers and our credible proximity to what transpires, which implicates us in the artist’s many problematic and polemic issues. Thus, Okón’s performances-as-portraits (or portraits-as-performances) reveal not only the ethical risks of art for the artist and his collaborators, but also poses a risk to the viewer’s subjectivity by making us uncomfortably complicit. Okón’s work mirrors our constructed ideas of the world and its inhabitants, our artificially and neatly drawn borders between truth and fiction, reality and artifice, dream and life. In Okón’s work, risk is the twin of uncertainty.
Gabriela Jauregui (from her text “Pull the Trigger!” in The Aesthetics of Risk, ed. by John Welchman. Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2008)
Yoshua Okón ist Stipendiat der Villa Waldberta
www.yoshuaokon.com