Nuria Güell and Levi Orta. YOU AND WHOSE ARMY

This project hopes to put into play different geopolitical situations with different relationships to the power apparatus through the work of Levy Orta (La Habana, 1984) and Núria Güell (Barcelona, 1981), whose practice goes a step beyond allowing the visualization of the structures and strategies of exploitation and subjugation of the individual in the current state of things. Sometimes nonalignment is not enough, infiltration strategies are necessary to create room to maneuver. Whether it is in a communist or a capitalist context, the documentation of the actions of this artists opens an horizon of visibility of the abuses of power allowed by the established “legality” and the dominant morals but they are always the second stage of an active and subversive infiltration into the system.

The political genealogy of the term intervention is directly related to the evolution of State power tactics, a State that namely intervenes instead of ruling. You and Whose Army? reflects on artistic practices based on intervention as a method but as one that has evolved mirroring the practices of administration of state power, from direct confrontation to more subtle and undercover operations. Fieldworks or undercover actions that involve certain personal risk for the artists but that follow the rules of the game in order not to be read or discovered as transgressions, not until a second reading occurs in the formalization of the art piece as a document within the jurisdiction of the exhibition space. Far from weakening their work, it is precisely in the action of covering their backs through the same legal and control strategies of the system they pretend to transgress that the artworks prove to be more revealing (excerpt from the foreword by Alejandra Labastida).

Nuria Güell and Levi Orta
YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?

artists:
Nuria Güell, Levi Orta

curators:
Alejandra Labastida