ART CITIES:Dubai-Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck

Since the mid-90’s Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck has developed a hybrid practice that incorporates the activities of a researcher, archivist, historian and curator. Working across various mediums, his productions formally resemble or incorporate the works of others, stressing notions of authorship and cultural authority.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Green Art Gallery Archive

Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s entangled narratives are motivated by sociopolitical questions involving gaps in collective knowledge or misrepresentations in the public record, often focusing on the importance of propaganda as a political strategy. Authority is a recurring theme, especially cultural authority. In his works he aims to reveal the political strategies and motives at work in the world by analyzing the dynamics of power and propaganda in modern history and aesthetics. Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s solo exhibition “Instrumentalized” brings together two bodies of work that confront the “propagandization” of human rights since the early days of their institutionalization, within the current climate in which human tragedy is used as a tool by governments, artists, NGOs and other public bodies to advance specific ideological agendas. The artist, who is known for his strategies of appropriation, presents the latest in his on-going series “Chronoscope 1952-53” (2017), edited broadcast footage from CBS’s “Longines Chronoscope”, an American television program that aired between 1951 and 1955 in the US, and invited “experts in the field” to offer opinions on current affairs, that covered issues such as the Korean War, the intensifying Israeli-Palestinian crisis and the draft of the United Nations Human Rights Charter. While the video appears to be a straightforward TV program, its source material has been heavily edited to emphasize the eerie resonances between the 1950‘s and the present. The easy-flowing sound bites reveal contradictions within the culture of political honesty and openness of the “democratic” West, exposing the mass media’s desire for instant gratification that has been a part of infotainment from its earliest moment. The “Instrumentalized” series (2017) is made of used clothing that behaves like paintings and sculptures. Unlike the Chronoscope series, with its barefaced political narrative, the series retreats into itself.

Info: Green Art Gallery, Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 28, Dubai, Duration: 20/1-7/3/18, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.gagallery.com