There are fourteen people seated around an old table. Today the menu is hot-pot made by Luxury Logico, and their show opens on Saturday. (Chicken bones are not good for the dogs, apparently). It will be sunny, then it will rain the following day. We have finished dinner. It is quiet. There is a river in front of the factory with a steady white noise of rushing sounds. Artist Les Joynes bids us goodnight - he will stage a performance on Saturday with Sam Basu. ‘Les’s performance work’, Isaac Muñoz contemplates,’is about exploring uncertainty in process. Can we add more uncertainty in someone’s work that is already about uncertainty?’ We will see on Saturday. What is Isaac doing? Is he undermining the work of his fellow artists?
Everyone goes to sleep, it’s late.
The works of the Mexican-born artist Isaac Muñoz can easily be cluttered along with the works from the other two solo exhibitions held simultaneously at the Treignac Project. His mimetic, disruptive - and at times intentionally minimalist probings into the various “logical spaces” he discovers, is what creates this epistemic confusion. Rather than establishing clear and coherent borders on his own solo exhibition, Muñoz chooses to work around the objects and concepts of other artists and to examine “naturally-occurring contaminations” between the propositions of each show. Through a working process that expands beyond the opening day, he will attempt to translate his experience of the other exhibitions into a series of preambles, transgressions and insights.
Instinctively, his interests fall on sensitive and dangerous perimeters. Structures that define the conceptualization of an artwork; the established official exhibition canon with its incorporated private previews; the presumed ability of art institutions and curators to guarantee readability in the display - all appear to be undermined in his attempts. What his work underlines, however, is the immediacy and importance of intersubjective relations - incorporating group dynamics and the contract between artists that settles in after a period of extensive verbal and non-verbal knowledge exchange. Thus, with agreed collaboration and in the spirit of soft participation, Muñoz slowly penetrates the work of the other artists first through forming his own hypotheses to finally arrive at a concrete cinematographic visualization of his opinion. The opening day will present an incomplete discussion that will grow with the approaching of the three shows’ closure.
JOURNAL, FORUM & DISCUSSIONS
A diary of the events, incidents, photographic moments, discussions and disagreements will be updated daily on the Facebook page of Treignac Projet. Each day a photo will be selected with the aim of provoking debates and benevolent conflicts.
PODCASTS
Tea break (2010) is a series of three short performances conducted in London and Treignac. Muñoz invited two people each time to have tea with him and talked about his assumptions concerning the project while the tea cups visualized his hypotheses. Tea break continued on site, as the real events evolved and some hypotheses inevitably died off. The last video will be conducted after the opening day inviting the other two artists to converse with him.
TRAILERS
Videos trailers of works executed along the duration of the exhibition. Extracts of the three videos Tea Break are available to watch as well.--------------------
Isaac Muñoz currently lives and works in London, UK. www.isaacster.wordpress.com www.metapong.org
Snejana Krasteva is an independent curator currently based in London, UK.
We are grateful to the creative involvement of artist Johann Arens, Camera and Editing.
Isaac Muñoz: Artist beneficiary of the Foreign Study Program from the National Fund for Culture and Arts (Mexico), and of Fundacion/Coleccion Jumex.
