“Malpaso: A Collaborative Investigation” Exhibition

The Clemente

This event has ended.

The Clemente, Abrazo Interno Gallery, 2nd Floor,

The Clemente Soto Veléz Cultural and Educational Center presents Malpaso, the inaugural collaboration between artists Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Birgit Rathsmann and Rick Karr. The exhibition focuses on the artists’ dialogue with an historic river valley in Chiapas, Mexico that’s now submerged beneath the waters of a reservoir behind a dam — a fluid locus where the quest for autonomy struggles to overcome thwarted beliefs.

The artists have long shared a fascination with water as a medium uniquely suited to upending assumptions small and large, a potent metaphor for knowledge that remains in a fluid state and never hardens into the kind of certainty that gives rise to rigid ideology.

The exhibition is organized around the metaphor of a small museum that documents the artists’ subjective experience of the landscape surrounding the Malpaso Reservoir in western Chiapas. The show investigates the historical layers of violence foisted onto this landscape as a consequence of colonialism, religion, and “progress”.