Fleeting Imaginaries

2014 CIFO Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition

CIFO Art Space, Miami │ September 5 - November 2, 2014

The title of this exhibition refers to the development of that which is imagined and the symbolic production of shared images. Although we are accustomed to identifying images that correspond with one specific culture or identity as if they were each clearly differentiated, in reality, imaginaries in themselves are uncertain entities; according to Néstor García Canclini, “that which we do not know or are about to know.”

To displace: to project, to substitute, to transfer, to translate. These are just some of the words that help us to better understand that nothing that moves remains intact. When something is not fixed, it sheds and gathers along the way, eventually creating an alternate perception. The imaginary is a socio-cultural construction that fluctuates, one which is in continuous transformation.

Although they may be as divergent as they are coincidental, the proposals for CIFO’s 2014 Grants & Commissions Program exhibition have been gathered under this title because they explore the idea of displacement. If imaginaries are “symbolic elaborations of what we observe,” then contemporary art plays an important role in recognizing how we see ourselves and allows the viewer to experience the imaginary through artistic practice.

This exhibition presents three possible categories of displacement: literal, conceptual and fragmentary. Be it through social comparison, representations of a changed culture, deconstruction of a formal structure or questioning how language is read, each of the works in Fleeting Imaginaries share a common ground: a state of flux within a constructed identity. It is as if in order for an imaginary to have a determined existence, one must question its validity through displacement.