Oscar Muñoz and Humberto Vélez

10 - 12 December 2010 in the Entire Gallery

City Gallery is excited to host a guest weekend screening of work by Oscar Muñoz and Humberto Vélez in the Adam Auditorium. Screenings will be on alternate days for each artist.

This screening runs in conjunction with the Contained Memory conference held 9–11 December at Te Papa Tongarewa. The conference seeks to bring together multidisciplinary perspectives in a discourse on contained memory. While memory is understood to be integral to the constitution of the self, it works in concert with external repositories of memory ranging from personal mnemonic objects to collective, social, and public memory residing in community traditions, artifacts in museums, and archives, including electronic and other recording systems. Memory is embodied in intergenerational rituals and practices and intangible forms of storytelling, song, and performance, as well as in natural elements and the physical memory forms of monuments and memorials.

Although there are distinct ways of thinking about or containing memory, the edges of containment are porous, enabling encounters between different expressions of memory. By encompassing a wide variety of ways of conceiving memory through different cultural and theoretical orientations and disciplinary backgrounds, it is hoped this conference can build a nexus of contained memories.

Colombian, Oscar Muñoz, is one of Latin America’s most significant artists. Much of his practice – including video installation, portraiture, drawing, painting, and performance – is concerned with memory, particularly in relation to the 50 years of political and social turmoil that has plagued his native land. Through his image-making, Oscar Muñoz explores memory’s ephemeral and mutable nature.

Humberto Vélez’s work actively explores the possibilities of working in collaboration with different groups (artists and handcrafters, special communities, athletes, musicians and groups conformed especially for the project), in different places and cultures. The artistic projects are conceived from what he calls “the ability to create esthetics” of, for, and with these groups, according to their different lifestyles, thereby managing different concepts and expressions of popular culture, power, and ethics. The human relations on which Vélez constructs his creative processes are as important as the final project. In his work, as it was described by curator Gerardo Mosquera, “the community should be an active agent” at the same time as his art also “interweaves personal memories, dreams, visions, and the determination of pretending to invent new worlds.” For this, the artist works with diverse media, ranging from the popular to the high-tech, from the traditional to the contemporary (8th Bienal de Arte Panama, 2008).