KBF Presents Art Talk with Pedro Gómez-Egaña

KOCHI:
With the opening date of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) 2016 – December 12 – drawing ever nearer, participating artists have begun making their way through Kochi’s warrens and bylanes to explore the location and gain context of the spaces that will eventually hold their works.
Among these visitors is Pedro Gómez-Egaña, a Colombian-born artist from Norway who is among the ‘First 25’ artists announced as participants in the third edition of India’s only Biennale, which runs up to March 29, 2017.
For insight into Gómez-Egaña’s art practice and his thought process as he prepares for the Biennale, the Kochi Biennale Foundation will be presenting an Art Talk by him. Titled ‘The Crash of George’, the event will get underway at 5 pm on Monday, June 27 at BTH, Ernakulam.
Trained in music composition and visual art, Gómez-Egaña’s practice expands across performance, sculpture, video, installation, and sound. His works refer to historical and cultural intersections between technology and temporality, while presenting the powerful and uncanny character of structures and machines.
His thinking draws from the contentions of French ‘philosopher of speed’ Paul Virilio that technological progress corresponds to the growth in potential for accidents: ‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity’.
“In some of my works, I present versions of historical machines and stage them in situations that expose them as powerful and haunted. In others, I use a historical approach to a particular site and produce performative situations where objects and stories speak of the relations between society and time,” Gómez-Egaña says of his art.
“I find great value in studying historical aspects of technology as it meets our current accelerated world. I believe that our complicated relationship to temporality lies in this genealogy,” he adds.
The Art Talk event is supported by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), Office of Contemporary Art, Norway and the City of Bergen.