With a tour focused on possible futures, the second part of ‘Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial’ of the Bronx Museum in New York presents us with the current challenges of art. Multiple formats and 27 artistic voices come together in the same space, designed for reflection.
The exhibition, which will be available until June 16, 2024, puts us in front of Eileen Jeng Lynch –director of curatorial programs at the museum– who combined works that question systems of power. Through the experiences of artists who are based on their own cultural identity, she traces a line of research between “the limits of visual language and materiality,” as she herself describes it.
Eileen Jeng Lynch He speaks slowly and with a clarifying certainty about the works: “This sixth biennial in the Bronx Museum enter our professional development program for emerging artists [AIM, por sus siglas en inglés]. We seek to give them the tools they need to show their work in a correct and sustainable way over time. The biennial falls within this process, with 53 artists in total. The second part brings together 27, and the common line is that they all criticize the systems of power.”
It is not only about bringing together different works or pluralities without giving an answer to current problems, Jeng Lynch summarizes it like this: “I like that we are presented with possibilities and ways of building worlds, always under the lens of our own identity. I understand this biennial as a collaboration, so I remain in constant communication with the artists, with their installations and ideas. The biennial is called ‘Bronx Calling’ [el llamado del Bronx] because it seeks to give a sense of urgency. We also want to give power to the community that makes life in the museum. “It’s not just about hanging art on the walls, it’s about connecting with viewers.”
We delve into the work of the creators María Elena Pombo (Venezuela), Ivana Brenner (Argentina) and Coral Saucedo Lomelí (Mexico)voices that help us chart a clear course towards the future of art in the region:
Venezuelan Petroleum for the South Bronx (They Called it Mena’) by María Elena Pombo
Talk to María Elena Pombo (Venezuela) It is always an exciting challenge. A woman of science and engineering, also trained in fashion at the Parsons School and who now expresses her vision of a contradictory country in the art circuit. She narrates it in her own voice: “I always wanted to work with oil. A guy in Cabimas, Zulia state, where oil comes out in every backyard, sent me a video that also appears in this exhibition. He wanted to make his own gasoline. I alerted him to the risks and he told me he wouldn’t do it. “That’s how I considered the idea of working with that first bottle.” It was the piece she was missing after working with avocado seeds, starches, mollusks and “onoto” tinctures. [achiote], as utopian raw materials in their country. This time oil (and the problems that Venezuela currently has to refine it and sell it in the world) would also be an artistic manifesto.
“I always need to respond to a place, to the context, I touched on a specific point of the government of President Hugo Chávez, when through a subsidiary of the official oil company of Venezuela, present in the United States (CITGO Petroleum), they began to subsidize the community heating in the Bronx, as well as cultural activities in this New York area, in fact some programs still continue and are part of the country’s ‘petro-diplomacy’. Hidden propaganda, which the United States and Europe normally do to countries in the global south, but here the opposite happened. This was a monument to this episode, perhaps not so well known. I wanted to achieve an enveloping piece. Regardless of whether it was right or wrong (understanding that Venezuela could have used this money for its own needs and programs) I already leave it in the past. I don’t even question it. The piece is made of silk, with a gel mixture in brown algae extract that ends up becoming a bioplastic. In my mythology, it refers to the sargassum of the Caribbean Sea. It is a specific reference, because at some point an attempt was made to create a silk and fabric industry in Venezuela, which never prospered due to the arrival of the Petroleum. It is a living piece, it peels, sweats, changes with the environment, but it reminds us that we could also have been ‘silk people’. Maybe the problem is not the oil, but how we relate to it.”
Ivana Brenner: There are no titles, but there is a lot of the corporeal, the sensual
Ivana Brenner (Argentina) With his sculptures he develops an intuitive approach, based on processes. His practice includes exploring clay and layers of paint. The Brooklyn-based artist tells us: “There are four pieces in total, there is one that I like, if you see it, you see her I like that game. It’s in a place, like hidden. There are other pieces made with what I call ‘paint skins’, stains that I put on a flat surface and then peel off. Like you burn your skin on a summer day. “I love the materiality of painting and the sensual experience it implies, and although I don’t paint per se, I found a way to do it.”
