Héctor Solari, REGARDING THE WAR, Small Gallery
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Documentation
Héctor Solari
REGARDING THE WAR
Witches’ Tower
April 17th – May 22nd, 2015
Héctor Solari was born in 1959 in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is a visual artist who uses video technology, printmaking, drawing and photography. He studied architecture and arts in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Lucca, Italy, at studios run by Luis Camnitzer and David Finkbeiner. Since 2000 he has focused mainly on video art. He took part in many exhibitions including Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain, Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota, Columbia, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina, Galeria Sektor I in Katowice, Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas de Montevideo, Uruguay, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, German Museum in Nuremberg, Germany, Centro Cultural Español, Montevideo, Itau Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Itau Cultural, San Paulo, Museo de la Memoria, Montevideo, and Hellerau Zeigenössischen Zentrum der Künste Dresden, Germany. Héctor Solari lives and works in Dresden, Germany. The artist makes his works using photography, drawing and video technology. These works are joined with the problem of death, which is revealed on two levels, a referential and interpretational level. This double optics of death shows how far Thanatos has become the element and potency of human experience today. The artistic manipulation with documents, in this case photographs, and fictionalisation of reality become an indirect commentary to the perspective imposed by the present time for example in shows such as reality-shows, and also in the rhetoric of mass media.
REGARDING THE WAR
Videos, drawings and script-sketches by Héctor Solari
Three videos (“Tea in Kabul”, 2010; “Coerper”, 2014 and “Regarding the war”, 2015) as well as the original drawings and sketches used for making the videos, are presented jointly in this exhibition under the title “Regarding the War”. Each of the presented works shows a different aspect of war or the abused body: in the first video we are the spectators, safe but horrified. In the second we perceive the body as it is. In the third video we identify ourselves with the victims watching their own spectacular liquidation.
TEA IN KABUL
Sketches and video | 17’30” | 2010 | production, sound: Héctor Solari
When the traveller from the south beholds Kabul, its ring of poplars, its mauve mountains where a fine layer of snow is smoking, and the kites that vibrate in the autumn sky above the bazaar, he flatters himself on that he has come to the end of the world. On the contrary, he has just reached its centre.
(Nicolas Bouvier, 1954)
About the video
This film is meant to recreate the reality that I can only envisage and that I have an intuitive feeling about. It is an attempt to expose the face of the war that has no face; the war that no one yet dares to call a war.
The images that we are occasionally presented with by media always depict the good soldiers who are very eager to help (but who is the beneficiary remains unclear) and the formidable enemy. I would like to reconstruct this patchy reality, which oscillates between fiction and authenticity, between metaphors and history. Each sketch within Tea in Kabul (Té en Kabul) shows a nameless universe that consistently, with no exception, is a universe of oppression and subjugation.
About sketches
The sketches constitute a script of a kind; they are matter on which the project is based. Steady, dynamic camera movements emphasise their individual elements in order to create successive scenes.
COERPER
Video | 8’ | 2014 | production, sound: Héctor Solari
Bodies: Brigel Gjoka, Héctor Solari, Wagner Moreira, Helena Fernandino, Peter Dreessen, Johanna Dreessen, Torsi
Assistance video: Jessica Züchner
This work is about the representation of the moving, the static or the choreographed body. The camera always stops on the surface of those branded, abused or lettered bodies, and she adheres to the skin and its texture.
The body only wants to be in the world.
REGARDING THE WAR
Sketches and video | 10’30” | 2015 | production, sound: Héctor Solari
The actual conflicts in the Middle East, in specific the fights for Kobane, have produced a new kind of war spectator. While we have been watching wars and catastrophes all over the world on television or the new media, the displaced persons of Kobane, safely behind the border, are still close enough to witness the bombardments and the fights in their city with their own eyes. Just as if they would be attending a theatre spectacle – or watching television.