October 8, 2020
The Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States | OAS AMA joins CEDA Washington to present the new AMA Artwork Shop. With works from the OAS AMA F Street Gallery, the initiative aims to support photographers of the Americas, offering curated photography that you can purchase online, as part of the #AMAatHome | #AMAenCasa platform.
For the Building Dialogs project, AMA’s Fabian Goncalves facilitates a variation on the usual role of a curator, providing a twist on conventional concepts of how exhibitions are built. Here he initiates a process in which a group of artists select pairings of each other's works, creating their own multi-layered narratives. Stimulating the conversation among this small network of artists, we pivot from a vertical to horizontal curatorial practice, we reinforce lateral contributions and visual syntheses, and we question the monolithic idea of authorship. Goncalves notes transformative visual dialogs among the four selected series of photo artists: Alejandra Delgado Uría, Thomas Kellner, Brad Temkin,and Gesche Würfel. This exhibition is the result of his facilitation of these artists building dialogs with one another, contextualized within Incan cosmology.
“An interwoven photo artists’ co-curated exhibition where each artist’s visual dialog is hosted on their website. The collective exhibition results in a kaleidoscope of images for the viewers to enjoy.” Pablo Zúñiga, former director, AMA
In Inca mythology, the universe is divided into three territories, or pachas: hanan, kay, and uku. These realms share a structure similar to that of the Catholic notions of heaven, earth, and hell. This overlap helped Spanish missionaries to advance their own religious notions in the New World while simultaneously allowing the Inca to preserve aspects of their own mythology within that of Catholicism, giving rise to syncretic beliefs that remain part of Andean myth and religion to this day. The three pachas represent three distinct planes of existence, interconnected and bridged by both physical and spiritual and mythological elements. Together, the three realms shaped Inca religion, the concept of the Inca cosmos, and the day-to-day worldview of both the Inca nobility and the common person. The three pacha realms are also conceived akin to buildings, with rooftops, levels, and basements. Through the photography of these four artists, we’ll explore these “buildings”: the hanan, the roof, through Brad Temkin’s Rooftops, a series of ambiguous and solitary gardens against the open Chicago sky; the kay, the center, through Thomas Kellner’s Brasilia, 50 Years of Utopia, in a melodic deconstruction of facades and interiors of Brasilia; as well as through Alejandra Delgado’s series Fantasmagorias, of disembodied architecture of Bolivian Cholets; and, finally, the uku, the basement, through Gesche Wurfel’s Basement Sanctuaries, a personalized and intimate view of New York City superintendents’ basements and common areas.
Alejandra Delgado Uria lives and works in Lima, Peru. She graduated from the Fine Arts “Hernando Siles” National Academy of Bolivia and earned her Masters in Photography at the School of Photography EFTI Imaging Center in Madrid. She has held artist residencies in Gallery KIOSKO, Bolivia in 2008 and Can Xalant Centre, Barcelona, Spain in 2010. She has held numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the BAJA FIDELIDAD and NUBE Galleries in Bolivia. She has exhibited extensively in Bolivia, Ecuador, Spain, USA, Paraguay, Chile, Germany, Brazil, and Peru.
Thomas Kellner was born in Bonn, Germany in 1966. In 1996 he completed his studies at the University of Siegen. He has primarily studied art and sociology, politics and economics to become a teacher at high school. Since 1989, he has been living and working as a visual artist in Siegen.
Brad Temkin is an American photographer. He is known for his photographs documenting the human impact on the landscape. Temkin's works are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Photography. His images have appeared in such publications as Aperture, Black & White Magazine, Time magazine and European Photography. His first book was published in 2005 entitled Private Places: Photographs of Chicago Gardens. He teaches photography at Columbia College in Chicago.
Gesche Würfel is a visual artist based in Chapel Hill, NC (USA). Her work has been exhibited, published, and awarded internationally; exhibition venues include the Tate Modern (UK); Blue Sky Gallery, Portland (OR); Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY (USA); Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) Raleigh, NC (USA). Würfel is the author of Basement Sanctuaries (Schilt Publishing 2014). Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, WIRED, and many other outlets. She is a recipient of grants from the Puffin Foundation, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council among others. Würfel was named as the Juror’s Pick for the LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards 2016, is a finalist in the 2019, 2018, and 2017 Lange-Taylor Award, and a Top 50 Critical Mass 2017 winner. Collecting institutions are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Museum, MA (USA) and the Portland Museum of Art, OR (USA). Würfel is represented by Tracey Morgan Gallery.
Fabián Goncalves Borrega has served as exhibition coordinator at the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC since 1998. He has directed the AMA F Street Gallery since its opening in 2005, dedicated to exhibiting works of photographers with social content, elevating emerging photographers of the Americas. Since 2018, the F Street Gallery implements a sustainable development program aligned with the mission of AMA’s parent organization, the Organization of American States (OAS). In response to public health regulations in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic, the AMA and the F Street Gallery has presented virtual exhibitions, focused on reaching the general public by reinforcing their presence on social media and the virtual pace.
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