“JUGO DEL CUERPO” Exhibition

(harbor)

poster for “JUGO DEL CUERPO” Exhibition

This event has ended.

This body of work is a portrait of the bridge between the six of us as artists and friends. And by extension, it represents a productive emergence amidst troubled US-Nicaraguan relations. “ABRIENDO LOS POROS” the Nicaraguans said. This is opening our pores. It’s like cooking over a hot burner, in an already hot room. Managua smells like burning. You never stop sweating. All of the animals are pregnant.
Slowly, over many trips, our individual practices began to dissipate into the smoky, yellow air.“Vaporismo”… our vapors combined… good smells began to waft out of our kitchen. This show is both a metaphor and an illustration. It is an avatar of a personified shared artistic and political relationship.

JUGO DEL CUERPO is a collaboration between New York-based and Nicaraguan artists.Three live and work in New York City. Three live and work in Managua, Nicaragua. All were participants in the Nicaraguan Biennial in Managua in early 2014 curated by Omar-Lopez Chahoud and it is there these six artists encountered each other. JUGO DEL CUERPO has had two exhibitions in Managua and this ‘Baby, will you please turn on my kitchen?’ A Social Practice Lubricant for Cooking will be their first work shown together in the United States. Mutual admiration arose from an awareness of our vast differences, the New Yorkers and their material compulsion, the Nicaraguans’ distrust of the object, and their centuries-old native performative histories. A horrible political past was like an axe thrown into the ground between us. Our sordid history with each other was almost insurmountable… painfully acute on one end and completely ignored on the other. How can we make a warm space together, in a place where the Cold War never ended? JUGO DEL CUERPO attempts to answer this. “Jugo del cuerpo??” the Gringos asked… trying to find the Spanish word for sweat. BODY JUICE. It couldn’t have been more accurate. We all knew that this was something special. Rum-fueled discussions in Spanglish exposed shared artistic currents.Everyone was surprised. Shared rum, shared beds, Santiago Serra, Doris Salcedo, Thomas Hirschorn, creating talk shows in the dark… POLITICAL CORRECTNESS MEANS NOTHING IN A PLACE WHERE ANYTHING GOES.

“Baby, will you please turn on my kitchen?” is a portrait of the bridge between the six of us as artists and friends. And by extension, it represents a productive emergence amidst troubled US-Nicaraguan relations. “ABRIENDO LOS POROS” the Nicaraguans said. This is opening our pores. It’s like cooking over a hot burner, in an already hot room. Managua smells like burning. You never stop sweating. All of the animals are pregnant. Slowly, over many trips, our individual practices began to dissipate into the smoky, yellow air. “Vaporismo”… our vapors combined… good smells began to waft out of our kitchen. This show is both a metaphor and an illustration. It is an avatar of a personified shared artistic and political relationship.

*BRIEF HISTORY and WHY WE ARE HERE
The current government, and overall social atmosphere of Nicaragua, is the by-product of the Sandinista Revolution, that began in the late 1970s… only a few years after one of the worst earthquakes to hit the

Western hemisphere in modern times destroyed the capital city of Managua. The Sandinistas, or the FSLN (Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional), were named after Augusto Sandino, who led the insurgency against the United States occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s. Fast-forward to late 1970s and 80s, post-earthquake Nicaragua. At this time, a Communist-allied movement, the Sandinistas, were fighting a war for control of the country, against a US-funded and trained guerrilla insurgency based outside of the capital. The US fear of Communism, as well as a fear of a Marxist-based uprising throughout Central America, led US President Ronald Reagan to enact a full trade embargo with factions, debt-wracked, and war-traumatized Nicaragua. Additionally, the United States funneled money through Israel from the illegal sale of arms to Iran, to the anti-Sandinista Contra guerrillas in what is now known as The Iran Contra Scandal. The US continued to train and fund the Contras as they committed horrifying mass human rights violations against Nicaraguan citizens who resided in Sandinista controlled areas. The Nicaraguan civil war raged on for a decade.

There is controversial evidence stating that the Reagan administration was in full support of the use of the drug trade to fund the Contras and perhaps the crack-cocaine epidemic in the United States in the 1980s is in part due this drug smuggling through Nicaragua. Because of these social conditions— the current culture and art movements of Nicaragua, have developed almost devoid of the influence of the United States. Nicaraguan’s native and performative histories are comparatively intact.

While there are stark differences between the members, JUGO DEL CUERPO is shared in its disappointment of our globalized art world’s failure to engage in true cross-cultural exchange— exchange that stretches beyond the confines of class, activism, and commerce.In our own kind of reactionary spirit, JUGO DEL CUERPO is dedicated to the rigor of art-making through togetherness.

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Schedule

from October 25, 2015 to December 06, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-10-25 from 18:00 to 21:00

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