East and West

Definitions of East and West are relative to where we stand in the world. For our participation in Untitled 2024, we have considered a group of artists whose works slip and filter between easy niches, as what they think and produce, referrers to, among other possible interpretations, islands of uneven development that defy basic categorizations, or as Immanuel Wallenstein puts it, “semi-peripheries in the world system” [1].

When we speak of ‘East’ versus ‘West’, it is usual to do so in terms of imaginary constructs of eastern thought such as transcendentalism and strong cultural values, versus a western sphere of mass consumption, popular culture, and individualism. East and west are nevertheless relative positions. In geographical and cultural terms, if we think of Eastern Europe, we should keep in mind that a host of the most cataclysmic and consequential transformations in recent European history have started and often also played out primarily in Eastern Europe—just think of the Sarajevo assassination in 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. In this context, ‘East’ as in Eastern Europe, means something different, as interpreted by the work of Radenko Milak. As a consequence of having lived in the political sphere of the Soviet Union for an important part of his life, he departs from a worldview that is fascinated with the fluidity of the representation of Western ‘modernity’. Born in the former Yugoslavia in 1980 and having lived the realities of war in his youth, Milak explores the images of different cities, finding great interest and aesthetic value in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, in the infinite views of high-rise buildings in Sao Paulo, and in the night views of Oscar Niemeyer’s Edificio Copan, where isolated individuals are seen from afar. This image winks at Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, where a professional photographer who is also a peeping tom witnesses a grisly murder, underscoring the artist’s knowledge and love of cinema. Views of La Habana are also of interest to the artist, where the communist city’s port is presided by the towering sculpture of the Virgen in the Iglesia del Carmen.

In a more ironic mode, the artist Juan Mejía (Colombia, 1966) represents in a series of collages made with waste materials, the tent as an archetypical model of architecture, a product of design and a metaphor for a lifestyle that idealizes communion with nature and the myth of the wild. But a tent is also a symbol of temporality, displacement, homelessness. These are also the reverse images of the West, that aptly speak about the failures of capitalism.

From a political perspective, Andrés Orjuela comments about the theatrical aspect of politics, as another stage of show business culture where the faces are hidden ‘under the mask', common all over the world revealing that the absurdity of the performance of power is inherent to human kind, and does not depend of a geographic location.

Jorge Barco’s sound sculptures combines traditional sacred vessels, such as totumos, with low-tech technology, containing sound of bodies of water, earth movements, birds, whales, rocks, recorded with devices developed by him. His process is imbued with zen values such as contemplation, active meditation, and harmony with nature, that, along with his recent work in collaboration with Arhuaco and Kogui communities of the Sierra Nevada in Colombia that share the same values, defies the construction of boundaries for East and West. Are American indigenous communities part of the East? America, especially Latin America, appears in a difficult position where is catalogued as Western, but cultural dynamics, marked by randomness, are quite different to the European rationalism of Western culture.

Astrid González and Isabel Gómez Machado propose alternative narratives where the voice is taken by normally silenced people. When Isabel Gómez Machado paints, she questions the female roles and gives an alternative life to her female lineage, sometimes just bringing them to the present and making them protagonists, sometimes accompanying them with syncretic power symbols. Astrid González takes us to Drexciya, an underwater world that works far from the geopolitical tensions of the surface, created by the unborn babies of the women thrown overboard of the slave ships.

To conclude, we see the works of these five artists from the perspective of semiotics. It can be stated that art is a semiotic sign-system that constitutes the logic by which communication and culture function together to create the human world of expression and perception. As such, art generates expression in itself and in reference to other values.

In stating the possibility of a relationship between East and West, we easily slip into a dichotomy where we define cultural practices of either/or, as Western, and both/and as Eastern. These phenomenological styles of human logic define two worldviews: on one hand as disjunctive, individualistic (West) and on the other, conjunctive, associative and collaborative (East). We hope that the presentation of the work of these artists together stimulates a dialogue that will inspire the viewers to see a multiplicity of references and connections that defy simple categorizations.

[1] Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. University of California Press.