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momuk announces Alejandro Cesarco exhibition

momuk presents work by Alejandro Cesarco in an exhibition on view 22 September 2012–13 January 2013. Opening 21 September 2012, 7 p.m.

The artist Alejandro Cesarco, who was born in 1975 in Montevideo, Uruguay and has been living in New York since 1998, will be showing three of his most recent works starting on 22 September 2012: the installation The streets were dark with something more than night or the closer I get to the end the more I rewrite the beginning (2011), the video, Methodology (2011), and a supplementary photo work plus a collage, Four Modes of Experiencing Regret (2012), specially created for the mumok. After much-acclaimed solo presentations in, amongst others, New York, Venice and Basel (Baloise Art Prize 2011) the exhibition Alejandro Cesarco will allow insight into his linguistically-oriented praxis.

What is the relationship between words and images, between the ‘sayable’ and the visible? How do readers recognise, or invent, the meaning of a story? How do memory and history, fact and fiction, interlock? Alejandro Cesarco devotes himself to these questions in his art works which make references to the legacy of international conceptual art: he makes linkages with language and literature-based designs by artists such as John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers and Lawrence Weiner but also with works by Félix González-Torres and Louise Lawler. His textual works, photographs, collages, films, artist books and installations all contain autobiographical as well as literary references. They reflect on the possibilities of making and translating historical references. During this process the emotional dynamics of interpersonal relationships is of special importance to him.

In 2011 Alejandro Cesarco was awarded the Baloise Art Prize. In his prize-winning installation, The streets were dark with something more than night or the closer I get to the end the more I rewrite the beginning (2011), he engaged with the literary genre of the detective story. In the installation, which consists of wall texts, a slide show, photographs and a booklet, visitors experience themselves as being private investigators in search of a narrative with order and meaning.

The seven-minute video, Methodology, (2011), is supplemented by photographs and concerned with the narrative structures arising from a secret in the form of the intimate conversation between two protagonists. The work, first presented to the public at the 54th Venice Biennale in the Uruguayan pavilion, pursues the question of what can be said in a relationship and what might be better left unsaid. The third work, Four Modes of Experiencing Regret (2012) which was specially made for the mumok, uses the connection between images and language as well as a pseudo- scientific depiction to produce an intentionally contradictory classification of the feelings of remorse and regret. The show will be opened on 21 September 2012, immediately after the museum’s fiftieth anniversary celebration symposium, 50 Years of mumok. History and prospects. Challenges then and now. www.mumok.at

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