ZURICH.- Daros Exhibitions presents For You / Para Usted, The Daros Latinamerica Tapes and Video Installations, on view through September 6, 2009. The exhibition’s title, For You / Para Usted, is drawn from a video by Liliana Porter, an Argentine artist living in New York. The show features 35 works on video, including large installations, by 22 artists, all from Latin America. All works date from the last 12 years. The artists are between 33 and 73 years of age and hail from Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Panama, Colombia, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Although most of the videos have a relatively short running time, it would take 5 hours and 40 minutes to view them all in their entirety. The works are distributed throughout the exhibition in such a way as to allow them to repeatedly allude to one another, and thus to provide topics of discussion. This in turn sets in motion a reciprocal process of discovery, and invites the viewer to enter into a stimulating interaction with the works on show.
It goes without saying that the limited space forbids all of the video works in the Daros Latinamerica Collection to be exhibited. Nor can we provide an encyclopedic survey of Latin America’s entire video production; we merely hope to offer a glimpse at the continent’s contemporary scene. In addition, we take great care to present the individual works as faithfully as possible, so that both the videos and their creators are shown to their utmost advantage.
The video works on show are solid and of universal value, accessible, original, high-quality, and possessed of a clear internal dramaturgy. Their technological spectrum is broad, from recording techniques that are putatively ‘primitive’ to the highest production standards. As a consequence, we exhibit the most diverse range of formats and presentation forms, all carefully planned, with nothing left to chance.
From simple documentation of a performance through comics and advertising all the way to cinematically complex narratives, every conceivable genre and iconography, no matter how idiosyncratic, has its place. The videos render accounts of the everyday, of the social, political, philosophical, neurotic, violent and sensual. They are metaphorical, self-reflective, provocative, absurd, drastic, ironic, lyrical, and much, much more besides: they offer us images that do not simply move, but which move us as well.
