Artist: Armando Andrade Tudela
Exhibition title: On Working And Then Not Working
Curated by: Elfi Turpin
Venue: CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France
Date: June 14 – September 16, 2018
Photography: Aurélien Mole, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and CRAC Alsace
Putting together an exhibition with Armando Andrade Tudela is like undertaking a trepanation. It’s making a hole in the artist’s head and inserting our fingers. Opening up his work to take the pressure off. Cutting a doorway into an artist’s system and sending him off down new roads to adventure. A delicate, archaic, ironic business. This trepanation is also a way of escaping a kind of exhibition bureaucracy bent on petrifying works we’d like to keep in a critical state until they tip over into the categories – sculpture, painting, photography, film, tool, furniture – that dichotomize studio practice and conceptual practice, North and South, hand and head. Trepanation’s a ruse. There are others.
Putting together an exhibition with Armando Andrade Tudela is working and then not working. It’s experiencing a transition – the moment when “The sun refused to set or, no, the Earth refused to move so that the sun could set, yes.”* It’s conceiving a space-time in which, in order to preserve them from that fixed mode of existence, the works are maintained in a kind of ambiguity, a process of transformation or of adaptation to paradoxical desires. Whether speaking to Peruvian modernity, European empathy, the pressure of things on the body or the traumatising effects of the academic, the work endlessly eludes any univocal approach, offering itself, instead, to oblique scrutiny from both sides of the Ocean.
E. T., May 2018.
* Alan Dugan, Poems Seven: New Poems and Complete Poetry (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001).
On Working And Then Not Working is conceived in collaboration with CA2M – Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid) who will propose a second iteration of the exhibition that will be curated by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané on February 22, 2019, and will go along with a publication.
