Tenerife Espacio de las Artes
8 November 2019 – 15 March 2020
The Tenerife International Photography Festival celebrated its first edition in 1991. Organised by the Tenerife Island Council and the Isla de Tenerife Photography Centre, it takes place every other year at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes since its creation in 2008. Its main mission is to enable and disseminate a broad reflection on the image as a means of expression, communication and participation.
Initially based on the study, discussion and dissemination of photography—at a time when the discipline began to enjoy recognition in the heat of the creation of new cultural institutions—, the festival has been incorporating other contemporary artistic manifestations in order to foster an understanding of our contemporary visual cultures.
Myths of the Near Future is the proposal chosen by open call for the XV edition of the festival. Directed by the editor and researcher Laura Vallés Vílchez, it offers a twist to the proposal carried out in the previous edition in which a curatorial team was incorporated into the project in order to offer a multiplicity of voices and approaches. On this occasion, the Danish curator Mette Kjærgaard Præst, the head of the public programme Alba Colomo Gil, and the collective Cine por venir, propose a curatorial methodology which origin is given in the series of exquisite corpses that shape the collective drawings from the collection that houses the TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes and the Isla de Tenerife Photography Centre.
Thus, “image,” “body,” “entanglement” and “now,” are the four folds that transforms the festival into that anthropomorphic body of doubtful origin— a creature both porous and contagious. From the promise or threat of what is presented to us as alien, Myths of the Near Future proposes to think of the space of representation as a place from which to share worlds, obligations and reparations of our senses governed by the means of our milieus.
Myths of the Near Future – Entanglement
Curated by Mette Kjærgaard Præst
Ana Mendieta, Ann Lislegaard, Claude Cahun, Dibujo Colectivos (Óscar Domínguez, André Breton, Victor Brauner, Jacques Herold, Remedios Varo, Jacqueline Lamba, Wifredo Lam), Drago Díaz, Jorge Oramas, José Luis Perez Navarro, Juan José Gil, Oreet Ashery, Óscar Domínguez, Patricia Domínguez, Pia Arke, René Magritte, Sebastián de Larraechea and Victoria Jolly (Arte Abisal), Robert Mapplethorpe
This exhibition aims to open up a conversation about otherness, fluidity, and the possibilities of transformation. It brings together artists who share an impulse to question assumptions of truths, and who propose alternative modes of action.
Today we are arguably living in a time of political and ecological crisis. We are realising that the constant drive towards capitalist progress has had immense and destructive consequences for the environment, and at the same time, the global political divide is manifesting in a rise in anxiety related mental health conditions and the loss of human rights that generations before us fought hard to gain.
In response to this crisis, notions of solidarity, otherness, and fluidity become increasingly vital as tools to challenge oppressive conditions. Through states of entanglement rigid hierarchies can soften, and fixed boundaries between self and other open up, creating fluid channels of communication and new possibilities of transformation.
Myths of the Near Future – Entanglement is a journey in search of new ways to communicate with, become part of, and entangle ourselves with our surroundings.