Interview mit Graciela Carnevale

Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten | Artist
Talk


Exhibition 08.03.2012 – 29.04.2012


In 1968 Graciela Carnevale took part in the Ciclo de Arte
Experimental, organized by the art group of the same name, with
“Acción del Encierroa”: without being informed in advance, the
public was locked in the exhibition space for over an hour. In
other words, she took prisoners. A glass front facing outward
provided a view into the inside of the neutral space, structured
as a White Cube, to the incarcerated visitors. Carnevale, who had
been working with minimalist works from the radius of the
“primary structures” since the mid-1960s, later increasingly
turned to a practice of art understood as emancipatory and
political; for example, in the capitalism critical movement
“Tcamán Arde”, the archive of which Carnevale had
organized.
In Moments, Carnevale’s work not only stands for a radical
concept of the construction of public and witness, but, together
with the archives, no less for a radical questioning of the
possibility to present actions and political art in the museum
context, accessible to the present.


Short Biography
As member of the artist’s group “Grupo de Artistas de
Vanguardia”, Graciela Carnevale (* 1942 in Marcos Juárez,
Argentinien) participated in conceptual exhibitions and
demonstrations against established art in the years between 1965
and 1969. Carnevale also worked in connection with the
political-activist movement “Tucumán Arde”, and archived their
actions. From 1994 in the collective “Grupo Patrimonio” she has
held exhibitions, actions and interventions in urban spaces. Her
artistic approach – represented by works in major collections in
Latin America, as well as in MoMA, New York or MACBA, Barcelona
and that, among others, could be viewed at the documenta 12 in
Kassel – focusses on social questions and art as an ethical
attitude.