This exhibition includes the works of the artists Thessia Machado and Amor Muñoz, winners of the first CIFO-ArsElectronica Awards in 2022 and is part of the Creative 2023-2024 Biennial Summit program. Considering the Biennial Summit theme focusing on arts and disaster recovery, the main purpose of this exhibition is to initiate a series of conversations about how the artists’ explorations of the connections between art and technology can allow us to rethink problems related to our ways of inhabiting the environment.

 

The works of these two artists, belonging to the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Collection, are particularly relevant to these issues. In her work, Muñoz questions the mono-technological culture that has led to the depletion of natural resources and the degradation of life. Machado explores the transformation of space through technology and her work is in part a response to "how the places most of us call home, now have to embody different sets of expectations and interactions," due to the pandemic and other spatial conflicts and contemporary life traumas.

 

According to Muñoz, her work titled Chimera, Expanded Bodies (2022) is “a sound installation made up of a set of bioautomata, artificial entities that contain living matter and generate performative gestures through their biological processes, which are monitored by sensors,” questioning the ways we relate to nature. As stated by Machado, her work int.: time slip (2022) is “an architectural lullaby. Two wall-mounted instruments react to light and vibrate the space itself with the sounds produced by bass and guitar strings.” For Machado, her installation is a way to reflect on how “[i]n the last few years, the few rooms that most of us can call home had to perform many new roles. Safe haven, shelter, protective bubble, sanitized respite, the structural components that make a home now had to embody other types of expectations and interactions.”

 

The University Galleries shares a vision with the Biennial Summit by focusing on promoting innovation through the work of contemporary artists whose practices are interdisciplinary by nature. Our common goal is also to increase the engagement of students and faculty in our programs, reaching out to new and expanded audiences. Thanks to the artists’ works, this exhibition is a great opportunity to rethink the ways we interact with experimental proposals in the arts.

 

 

 

Sponsored by the College of the Arts Creative B Summer Program in partnership with the Office of the Provost and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation.