Curator: Dan Cameron
For most of its recorded history, an essential quality of visual art has been the effort that has been made to prolong its existence. If a work of art that was considered really important, the responsibility to ensure its transmission from one generation to the next lay with their owners or custodians; the inability to do so could only be caused by calamities such as war or a major fire. Whether mounted on the wall of a church, hung in the rooms of a patron of the arts, or carefully guarded and sealed inside a Swiss vault, an absolutely essential aspect of the material and symbolic value of art has always been its unlimited capacity to force to protect it from damage caused by weather, a state of permanence that we-the same viewers whose unbroken devotion maintains its reputation with Vital- pulse, we can only speculate.
The artworks are far from being the only devices designed to last. Humans build pyramids and monuments, banks and museums with walls, floors and ceilings impressive strength, partly because we are made primarily of soft and flexible surfaces suspended in viscous liquids that can be manipulated and impregnated relatively easily, so that we need more protection than those species equipped with fur or a thick shell. Unlike the safe walls around us, the essential characteristics of human tissue require you to connect and sometimes, to join with other tissues for dynamic structures can relate, and even disconnect then back together again. Until recently, this essential mutability of form and matter, which defines us as living beings, it had not been a feature we have sought in art we consider most significant, but there are signs that this is changing. Current in contemporary art, emphasizing its social applicability in favor of monetization in the global marketplace, events seem to suggest a separation of the international artistic community into two camps: those whose function is to speculate on the profitability of art in the future, and those who use art as a tool to look at the status quo of the planet and suggest other ways of seeing the world to share with our peers.
The XIII Biennial of Cuenca, Impermanence, proposes to put together a group of geographically and stylistically diverse artists who share an interest reflect the weaknesses and follies of human existence essentially linked to our fleeting condition. Thus, the display recognizes that the challenges of making art compared with some of the biggest obstacles of human existence, may seem minor and trivial for those who are not aware of their relevance, in the same way that our species probably seem insignificant when compared with the entire cosmos around us. And yet, we appreciate art and by deep and sometimes primary reasons include the desire to preserve our name after death. In this context, it may be the art of the ineffable, of helplessness and transitory which speaks more eloquently to our constitution temporary and transient wrappers energy gradually dispersed in a cold universe and continuous expansion mode. In its appeal to the inner sensitivity of the viewer, the XIII Bienal de Cuenca subtly changes some previous relationship with the works of art conditions, which, in the final analysis, are the heritage of all humanity a single museum, state or individual.
As a thematic concept, Impermanence is also one of the central tenets of Buddhism, according to which all existence, without exception, is subject to change, and this transience is increasingly a feature of life and art that we have today an art whose value lies less in keeping intact a hundred or a thousand years, which in its ability to connect in the present and fleeting moment of our exchange with it, even if in a week it has disappeared without a trace. Such an approach requires us to consider the ways in which the preconditions of a life lived are materially more malleable and less predetermined than many of us imagine. By freeing art from the obligation to remain beyond our memory, we experience it as an expression of rejection futilely clinging to what, to begin with , never was ours.