PASIG – MANZANARES
Sally Gutiérrez Galería Formato Cómodo Opening 6 April 2017, 20:00 h


PASIG – MANZANARES Sally Gutiérrez After the research process leading to the shooting of her non-fiction film Ta Acorda Ba Tu El Filipinas?, Sally Gutierrez's new project takes us on a new exploration of the host of current and historical links binding Spain and the Philippines. Sailing up and down waterways, cognitive maps, constituent texts, foundational questions, tree cuttings and saplings, the exhibition casts multilayered echoes and resonances in all directions across the time-streams, re-shuffling the arrows of linear chronology that seem to separate the past from the present, and an "us" from a "them". Cross-hatching temporal and political dimensions coalesce into a sort of continuous present marked by corruption, racism and state violence of the kind already described by Rizal at the close of the 19th Century. From one Bourbon King to another, from early imperialist Liberalism to globalised Neo-liberalism, from the Pasig to the Manzanares, across both sides of the river of time, watching memories and desires go by like trees floating down a watercourse that is still our own.


Sally Gutiérrez works with expanded formats in a hybrid area between contemporary art, visual essay and documentary. Her artistic projects start from a critical, feminist and de-colonial standpoint to examine ways of inhabiting, resisting and living (or surviving) in geographies where space and objects are also social agents in the networks and crises of globalization. She has developed projects in South Africa, the Philippines, Germany, Spain and the United States working closely alongside local communities and organizations. Aside from individual projects as her recent film Ta acorda ba tu el Filipinas?, she is currently exploring other modes of working and authorial subjectiveness through my involvement in collectives like Declinación Magnética, which bring together curators and theorists as well as artists working in diverse disciplines in a regime of horizontal collaboration and methodological hybridisation. Her work has been seen in museums and galleries including Metamatic:Taf (Athens), Matadero, Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, La Casa Encendida and Formato Cómodo (Madrid), MACBA (Barcelona), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Kunstwerke, Akademie de Künste (Berlin), and the Parker’s Box, WhiteBox and PS1 galleries in New York.