Horacio Zabala and Eduardo Kac “Spaces of Repression and Liberation”

Henrique Faria Fine Art

poster for Horacio Zabala and Eduardo Kac “Spaces of Repression and Liberation”

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Henrique Faria Fine Art presents Spaces of Repression and Liberation, a dual exhibition of historical works by Horacio Zabala and Eduardo Kac. Both artists were working during tumultuous periods, one in Argentina and the other in Brazil, near the end of dictatorial regimes. As societal and political limitations bore down upon civilians, artists sought alternative modes of creative expression as a means to continue developing artistically while, importantly, responding to the harsh realities of their current situation. Through their different series of works, Zabala and Kac explore the effects that authoritarianism, censorship and violence had on the body, identity and individuality.

With his training in architecture, Horacio Zabala has used its modalities in his conceptual investigation of confinement and constriction. Jails and prisons have long been subjects of Zabala’s focus. Espacio represivo (Repressive Space) (1973/2014), recontextualizes such a punitive space inside the gallery. The installation, comprised of scaffolding, steel strapping and chairs, will be specially reconstructed for this exhibition and shown alongside its supporting works: blueprint drawings, Anteproyecto de espacio represivo (Preliminary Plans for Repressive Space) (1973), and an architectural model, Maqueta de espacio represivo (Maquette for Repressive Space) (1973/2014). As these works play with magnitude and dimensionality, they are able to restore, as Julieta González writes in the exhibition text, “these architectures to the realm of lived experience” where the human body determines the scale. Zabala’s works investigate not only the scale of repression but also the scope, as his censored newspapers echo Espacio represivo’s defined limits, colorfully blocking the material printed within the pages’ borders, rendering it trapped.

Eduardo Kac’s Porn Art Movement in 1980-82 was, rather, centered on demonstrating the plurality and playfulness of the human body in daily experience, that which could not be subverted by totalitarian political mandates. Using the body as his primary medium, Kac created works that incorporated poetry and performance and reappropriated pornography and drag as a means to critique social conventions and traditional notions of obscenity. As Kac writes in his essay The Porn Art Movement: reflections on an avant-garde, “Living during a moment of political uncertainty, rampant police brutality, and spiraling inflation, I considered the authoritarian government and the social inequality it produced obscene and immoral— not one’s body in its natural state or its effluvia and proclivities.” In Pornogram 2 (1981), Kac, nude and bathed in sunlight, faces the 19th Military Police Battalion building that lies outside of the frame, with the Copacabana Church in the shadowed background. This photograph depicts dichotomies experienced under the dictatorship: the state of the natural body in the environment of repression, the quest for self-determination in the face of reactionary religious and political dictums.

As Zabala deals with penalization and isolation while the works of Kac propose brazen examples of defiance, Spaces of Repression and Liberation explores two strategies utilized in the varied spectrum of institutional critique. Though created over 40 years ago, these works remain sharply relevant and offer an opportunity for continued dialogue on the freedoms and restrictions of the body, the gestures of homogenization and reactions to it, and the place of art amidst social change.

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Schedule

from May 15, 2014 to June 21, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-05-15 from 18:00 to 21:00

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