Bienal de las Fronteras: Luz María Sánchez, Mauricio Sáenz and Maya Yadid

The first Bienal de las Fronteras was organized by the Institute Temaulipeco para la Cultura y las Artes and took place in Matamoros at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Tamaulipas, from March 5 to May 30, 2015.
With the support of a selection committee, the Bienal presented the artistic value and work of artists coming from different generations and latitudes; all emerging artists. The Garrillo Museum has the pleasure of showing three of the awarded works.

The Bienal de la Fronteras is about constructing and experience. Its limits are defined by its works of art, ideas, and biographies of its participants, who are giving their contribution to a contemporary imaginary of the boundary.
This is a rich, complex, diverse, and some times contradictory ensemble: its contents cross each other to express social, political, geographical and psychological aspects.

The selected artists for the exhibition at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil are:

Luz María Sánchez won The Bienal de la Fronteras with her work V.F(i) n_1 which is a multichannel sound sculpture/installation. The title is a sort of acronym in Spanish; it means Vis. (un) necessary force. It is the first of the series, hence the number 1. V.F(i) n_1addresses the subject of violence from the citizen’s perspective. Since media is not covering everyday experiences of violence, people flock to the arena offered by social networks, and share their own sounds and images –the ones that communicate their particular experiences within this context of explicit violence.V.F(i) n_1 is assembled using 74 audio players gun-shaped, that build a large format sound-texture composed of the same number of acoustic logs: shootings recorded by citizens caught in confrontations between law enforcement and organized crime in Mexico. V.F(i) n_1 consists of 74 independent audio channels, and the sound tracks are played individually on each of these speakers. At the end of the day and as the batteries run out of charge, speakers/guns go off gradually so the circle of operation/sound non-operation/silence is restarted. The audio tracks that integrate this sound installation/sculpture were taken from different videos available at the YouTube site. Civilians in the middle of a cross fire caught in-camera this “balacera” or shooting, and uploaded these files making them public.

“For many reasons, some of them due to threats from Drug Cartels, everyday violence happening in the country is not being covered by regional or national Media, so people are flocking to social networks to share their own sounds and images” explains Sánchez.

Maya Yadid’s video 443 follows a young couple driving a car along a desolate highway singing along at the top of their lungs to a song lamenting a better world. The works is playful but yet critical about the geographical, cultural and identity borders between nations.

Mauricio Sáenz, the artis from Tamaulipas, addresses the theme of communication in the contemporary society, represented by fragments of dialogues in Chinese language with his work titled Nacional.