ART CITIES:Brussels-Iván Navarro
Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1972, Iván Navarro grew up under Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. Pinochet ruled Chile by ruthlessly suppressing anti-government protesters for seventeen years after he raised the coup and became the president of Chile in 1973. He cut off the power and enforced curfews for keeping people to stay in their homes. Childhood memory of light, the method of controlling, became Ivan Navarro’s subject matter for his works.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Templon Archive
While Iván Navarro recalls from childhood the persistent fear of “Being disappeared”, the fate of many political dissidents, it was not until he relocated to New York City in 1997 that he began to learn more about the extent of human rights abuses in his country, and the subject now forms the core of his practice. For his new exhibition “Prostutopia” Iván Navarro has deconstructed the notion of utopia. Extending his exploration of the energetic forces that incite revolutionary action, and following up on his recent exhibition “Fanfare”, at Templon Paris in 2017, which invoked the power of sound and music as a revolutionary tool, he now turns his attention to the utopian vision and its exploitation. His new works take the notion of utopia and its subsequent commodification as its starting point. The works of the exhibition question the distorting spectacle of utopia dressed up, marketed and denatured. In his work Navarro uses electric light as his primary medium, making politically charged sculptures and installations that address the violence inflicted by the Chilean state. On a local level, his works refer directly to crimes perpetrated by the country’s military regime, but some also reflect his concerns about global issues, addressing, for example, capital punishment in the United States. Navarro appropriates the austere visual language of Minimalism, in particular that of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent-light sculptures and imbues it with explicit and critical political resonance. In the half-light of the exhibition space, electric sculptures create an interplay of light and optical illusions that transform the space. These subverted everyday objects (a fence, two vanity mirrors, a ladder, a book, a three-tiered podium, a booth) while immediately playful and appealing, take us on a journey haunted by the issue of control and freedom. Each object becomes an instrument of control and surveillance. In a world where everyone is constantly watcher and watched. Iván Navarro questions the illusion of protection and connection which nourishes the ambivalent power of the political, economic and social bodies doing the watching: government, businesses and social media. The viewer’s body plays a central role in Navarro’s work, in sculptures resembling furniture and in immersive room-size installations. On the opening evening, the exhibition includes the performance “Sirens”, conceived in collaboration with Courtney Smith, where three volunteer participants each occupy one of the three podiums. Periodically prompted to shift postures and explore the possible uses of the object to the body, they are free to move and speak and interact; yet strictly confined to their individual stations.
Info: Galerie Templon, 13A rue Veydt, Brussels, Duration: 6/9-20/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.templon.com
