A collaborative exhibition by 40 galleries across 20 Mexico City spaces
OPENING
Thursday 11 April & Friday 12 April, 12–6pm
Pequod Co. is pleased to extend a warm welcome to Instituto de Visión as a special guest gallery to its space during CONDO Mexico City 2024, presenting Two of Us, an exhibition by Ana Roldán and Otto Berchem open to the public starting April 11. In the collaborative spirit of CONDO—an initiative that generates exchanges between local and foreign galleries in different cities—and with a strong emphasis on the affective and professional ties that are built between projects over time, we are honored to offer a glimpse of Instituto de Visión’s program to the Mexico City ecosystem until May 25, 2024.
Just as the line represents the distance between two points, the landscape is drawn from the experiences of two or more observers. This exhibition, which revolves around landscaping as a cross-cutting theme in art, encompasses video, painting, and sculpture. The idea of landscape has been constructed from a set of inherited and personal concepts and contexts involving more than one subject. Two of Us brings together recent works by Ana Roldan and Otto Berchem, proposing different ways of addressing the landscape as a representation and as a zone of conflict.
Roldan’s most recent work consists of a series of ceramic plates depicting battlefields based on designs traditionally used by war strategists. Ana employs a visual vocabulary she designed based on the Best Mugard drawing method. Roldan’s war landscapes can be interpreted as emotional pictograms of war, in which feelings play as important a role as trenches.
Otto Berchem, on the other hand, has also developed his own chromatic alphabet over the years, which he employs as a tool to interpret and appropriate different realities. By strategically replacing letters with colors, Berchem seeks to highlight the impossibility of translating or exporting the poetic or transcendental experience into the material world. In Berchem’s paintings, words are transformed into images with the aim of blurring the boundaries between description and representation.
In Roldan’s constructions, which are articulated from found objects, ceramics, and drawings, there are indications of how broad geographical areas such as the Orient, Europe, or Mexico are conceived within globalized popular imaginaries. In this way, the landscape is an interpretation of preconceived ideas designed to favor international trade. At the same time, the landscape is made up of memories of emotions generated by experiences lived in a place.
The video pieces by Roldan and Berchem, in which the flag takes center stage, close the exhibition by drawing a clear parallel between the practices of both artists, who share similar concerns about the codes, symbols, and meanings consumed by mediated and globalized culture. For both artists, it is crucial to explore, through language, their relationship with nature and its purest dimensions, such as the ocean or the mountains, while also taking a stance against the artificial universe, including poetry, language, or war.
Ana Roldán (1977, Mexico) lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. After studying history at ENAH, Mexico, she studied fine arts at HKB Bern from 1999-2003. In the same year, she began showing her work in well-known institutions such as Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunstmuseum Bern and Kunstmuseum Solothurn. In 2005, Roldán was awarded a grant from the swiss federal office of culture, as well as a residency in Paris. 2006 and 2007 she won two prizes and exhibited in France, Germany, England, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain and China. In 2008, Roldán spent one year working in Kunming, China, invited by the cities of Zurich and Kunming. Two further prizes were awarded to Roldán in 2009 and 2010.Important exhibitions include soloshows at Badischer Kunstverein and at Kunsthaus Langenthal in 2011 as well as groupshows at Witte de With in Rotterdam 2012 and the participation at Lulennial in Mexico in 2015.Her work is inspired by cultural phenomena: Historical events, philosophical ideas, language, systems, reflections on aesthetics; theoretical concepts in general. Roldán is interested in how the spectators can be stimulated physically as well intellectually through the opposition or displacement of the mentioned systems.Ana Roldán works in diverse medias such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage. She often employs natural materials such as coconuts, bamboo, wood, semi-precious stones or leather that reflect the origin and usage of the material in the investigated cultures.
Otto Berchem’s practice explores social and visual codes, focusing on the relationships between language, architecture, history, and poetry. Berchem’s interest in codes goes back to 1994’s Men’s Room Etiquette, a public intervention touching upon the unwritten codes of how men behave with other men in public toilets. With The Dating Market, a project conceived in 2000, Berchem created a series of shopping baskets for patrons of supermarkets to themselves “available” and looking for a date. In Temporary Person Passing Through, a work for the 2005 the Istanbul Biennial, Berchem investigated the relationship of Istanbul’s street children and their movement within the city, using the visual language of Hobo Signs, a system of symbols employed by itinerant workers in the USA from the 19th to the mid 20th century.
