BLUE ORCHIDS – Johan Grimonprez

Main Room

April – May 2018

In collaboration with ltd los angeles and as part of Condo Mexico City, Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo presents ‘Blue Orchids’, an individual show by Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez (1962), second exhibition at the Main Room of the gallery. For the first time in Mexico, and after its previous screening in 2017, Blue Orchids, 2017 (48 min) and Raymond Tallis I On tickle, 2017 (8 min) will be presented next to a series of works selected for the project .

The personal stories of Riccardo Privitera (arms dealer and supposed element of the Special Forces of South Africa) and Chris Hedges (former ex war Correspondent of the New York Times) draw a completely opposite portrait on the same subject: the global arms trade and the corporate government that rules the most powerful societies in the world: the United States and the United Kingdom. In a very Hollywood style, Grimonprez presents two testimonies where the physical and mental ravages of war pose a discussion about the social and political, but also about the power of images and mass communication. In Blue Orchids the history of Hedges (always sheltered by the Augustinian humanist discourse) and Privitera’s (assiduous to the services of brothels with political ends) are presented as constant elements in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ where international weapon manufacturers are the only winners.

For Raymond Tallis, philosopher, novelist, cultural critic and neuroscientist, consciousness is not an internal or biological construct, but rather a relational phenomenon that has to do with the encounter with the other. Starting from the peculiar fact that individuals are incapable of tickling ourselves, and through Descartes and Schroedinger’s discourses, Tallis revises, the philosophical notion that we become ourselves only through dialogue with others.

Johan Grimonprez lives and works in Belgium and the United States.

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