Paula Hurtado Otero at Künstlerhaus Bremen

Artist: Paula Hurtado Otero

Exhibition title: Muttering Incantations

Curated by: Nadja Quante

Venue: Künstlerhaus Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Date: December 4, 2022 – January 15, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and ©Künstlerhaus Bremen

Paula Hurtado Otero is interested in the community-building and unifying element of stories and the potential of fiction to draw an alternative, multi-perspectival reality. In her multimedia installations, she explores forms of storytelling and questions narratives shaped by colonization. Her artistic practice is based on long-term research, collaborations and travels.

During her year-long studio grant at the Künstlerhaus Bremen, Hurtado Otero explored vessels as archives and carriers of invisible histories. In her new work, titled The Carrier, The Plot, The Instrument, the artist brings together video, sound, text, and objects to create an installation in which each element is the carrier of a story. She tells a story of bodies within the interplay of the five elements: earth, water, fire, air and space. The video camera circles an object with five interconnected vessels, which can also be seen in the installation on a dry riverbed of stones. Five women feel and examine the ceramic body, the surface, the shape and the inner space of the vessel. They swirl the vessel and let the water flow from one body of the vessel to the next – just as stories are passed from one body to another. They make the object sound – without the sound being audible, because the video remains on mute. An English text in the video’s subtitles tells a poetic story that unfolds in interwoven strands: A conversation between a vessel and a woman, a story about the relationship between man and fire. Sounds recorded with the vessel can be heard through loudspeakers in the room – the sounding body of the vessel, knocking, water, a voice speaking into the vessel.
The story emerges in the in-between – in the parallelism, but not synchronicity, of image, text, sound, voice, object, and landscape. It questions the linearity usually attributed to history and replaces it with different strands of history. In Hurtado Otero’s poetic approach, the vessel becomes the embodiment of earth, water, fire, air and space – the ether in which it was created. “Because I listen to everything, and to listen to everything is to embody chaos.”

Paula Hurtado Otero, The Carrier, The Pot, The Instrument, 2022, Multimedia installation, HD video, text, audio, ceramics, stones, dimensions variable, video 30:30 min, audio 18:20 min and 17 min. Concept, direction and text: Paula Hurtado Otero / camera: Daniel Meißner / editing: Hassan Sheidaei / sound: Norman Neumann / actresses: Ana Patiño, Moira Anouk, Zainab Haidardi, Behshad Tajammol, Gabriela Valdespino