NILC: New Interterritorial Language Committee (Artes Visuales) (English and Spanish Edition) - Softcover

Ventura, Miguel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9686842497 ISBN 13: 9789686842494

Publisher: Trilce Ediciones S.A. de C.V, 2016

Synopsis

Olivier Debroise introduces this book as a review of the 13 years of artistic production by Miguel Ventura and his corrosive critique of the mechanisms of power through video, performance, and interactive multimedia installations, now scenarios for staging of his obsession with the transmutations of the body and the dissemination of a language based on the braids of Heidi Schreiber, Ventura's infantilized schizophrenic female alter ego.

NILC is a project that includes photographs on experimental subjects in strange dynamics, tables of illustrations as if to were used as an alphabet, official documents and t-shirts that corroborate the impact and institutionalism of the mission. All in all, it is a harsh and undermining campaign against major projects like the Inter-territorial Language Committee (ILC) of East Africa, which was responsible for the manipulation and standardization of spelling, grammar, and vocabulary in the Swahili language.

Ventura's art simply takes us to double-think the consequences of revolting with language, body, and power schemes and conceptions.

Text in English and Spanish.

About this title

About the Author

"Miguel Ventura (San Antonio, Texas, 1954) is a multidisciplinary artist. He studied at Princeton University and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but lives and works in Mexico City. His paintings from the early 90s were meditations on the breakdown of family, nations, borders and the individual. After that, he began to focus on interdisciplinary practices (drawing, photography, video, installation) in which he explored the implications of language as a device for power. He has exhibited in solo shows in Mexico, Spain, and Holland, and group shows in America and Europe. "

Reviews

In a variety of media and supersaturated colors, artist Ventura explores the more coercive sides of family and society, and the ways in which they form the limits of identity. In this catalogue prepared by a Mexican publisher, a terrific essay by PW's Calvin Reid, titled "Tumorous Growths and Hangdog Neurotics," describes Ventura's background (gay, Puerto Rican, raised in Germany, based in Mexico City and New York) and takes a tour through Ventura's oeuvre, finding an artist "fixated on Orwellian social control" who is "equally concerned with a primal state of innocence and childlike developmental receptivity." It's a heady combination, as revealed in the plethora of color photos documenting Ventura's performances and living installations of families in underwear-like uniforms, frolicking unnaturally around creepily heightened domestic spaces (and eating some nasty-looking stuff). His experiments with orthography and full-blown language invention cannot be summarized here, but they are beautifully represented. There are four essays total and an extensive interview; all appear in Spanish and in English. The whole makes for an extremely satisfying overview of a maverick artist.

Edition details

• Publisher: Trilce Ediciones S.A. de C.V
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9686842497
• ISBN 13: 9789686842494
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184