Nicolás Guagnini
2021Clear Allegiance
Nicolás Guagnini
Nicolás Guagnini
Clear Allegiance features the artist demonstrating by himself in the streets of Harlem with a transparent flag. Guagnini starts in the poorest part of the neighborhood, near a trash processing plant, and walks up to Columbia University, an island of privilege to which he indeed belongs himself as a professor. In keeping with the entwined politics of disenchanted capitulation and sly subversion, repositioning himself as a child of the failed revolutionary promises of 1968, Guagnini waves his flag in non-heroic moments, making the context his content, contingency his ideology. Negation and retreat are not an option, but neither is utopia. Transparency, surveillance, public space, reflection and reflexivity constitute the elements of Guagnini’s critical poetics of his time and space. Source: https://www.kinosued.com/
Clear Allegiance
Axiom of Choice
Nicolás Guagnini, Karin Schneider
Jonas Mekas, Sebastian Mekas
Evoking the physiognomy of a Rembrandt portrait, Axiom of Choice depicts Jonas Mekas and his son Sebastian, their heads rotating in radiant chiaroscuro against a black ground. With Mekas at its center, the references to cinematic machinery abound in this work: from the proto-filmic zoetrope (which used a spinning cylinder to create the illusion of a moving image), to the flickering zoom of Ernie Gehr’s film Serene Velocity, to the enormous gyrating machine at the center of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale. —Richard Birkett, Karin Schneider & Nicolás Guagnini
Axiom of Choice
