Viewpoint

2011 CIFO Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition

CIFO Art Space, Miami │ September 9 - November 6, 2011

Viewpoint: 2011 CIFO Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition commemorates the eighth annual exhibition dedicated to the foundation's grants programs at the CIFO Art Space. The emerging artists selected as recipients of CIFO's 2011 grants are: Laura Belém, Marcius Galan, Fritzia Irizar-Rojo, Begoña Morales, Amalia Pica, and Antonio Vega. The mid-career artists selected for CIFO's Commissions award are: Tania Bruguera and Alicia Villarreal. This year also commemorates the first time in four years since the foundation has awarded its prestigious Achievement Commission, this time to David Lamelas whose artistic contribution in the past 30 years has been a pioneering force in the development of conceptualist practices and has laid the framework for a younger generation of artists who have expanded these practices in to their own.

The exhibition includes works by all recipients of the program with the exception of Tania Bruguera, whose thought provoking performance will take place in January 2012. The works in this exhibition, by artists whose experiences range from emerging to more established, examine the relationships and highlight the commonalities between artists with varied conceptual approaches and generational divides. The works presented in this exhibition are the result of a year-long process in which artists are nominated by CIFO's Honorary Advisory Committee of art professionals and then selected and ratified by CIFO's Board of Directors. The artists in the exhibition are not chosen based on a specific theme, movement or approach but rather selected based on the investigative nature of the work proposed and on the relevance of its content within the context of contemporary art. Every year, CIFO invites the artist to Miami to install their artwork, participate in public programs and interact with the other recipients of the program.

The title of the exhibition, Viewpoint, plays on the idea of a point as a place from which to view. Starting from the artist, through the viewer and back, it is the relationship with and through the artwork that is the focus of this exhibition. It documents the transition of works (whether in video, photography, performances, sound, space interventions and drawings) from a personal place where a work is born as a subjective idea, to the exhibition space where it is transformed into an object to be experienced.

Artists David Lamelas, Begoña Morales and Alicia Villarreal peripherally employ documentation tactics to create views of time, place and space. The works in Viewpoint then move from alternative proposals for documenting place to pieces that create space anew such as those by Marcius Galan and Laura Belém. On the other hand, Amalia Pica, Antonio Vega and Fritzia Irizar-Rojo's pieces examine the viewer's position in social and physical space and how this determines their ability to perceive and access the concepts explored in each of these works. 

Although her contribution to the exhibition will not be seen until January 2012, Tania Bruguera's interdisciplinary trajectory has long explored behavior and performance art in an effort to demonstrate (and a belief in) the power of art to change and awaken society. Her performance will bring to question our own position in society and how we act or passively resist the elements that inspire discontent in our relationships with each other, with our neighbors, with government policies and beyond. It is in this way that her performance will complement the other contributions by artists in Viewpoint.

These works explore our position in place, reformulate our relationship to space and explore the importance of our positions on communication, interaction and cooperation. They explore the position of the viewer, the executed, the outsider, the affected, the listener, the winner and the loser through a series of enabled views, retold narratives and histories. As a result Viewpoint becomes not only a passageway in to each individual practice, but a slideshow of the dynamic dialogue that characterizes contemporary art today.